
-V* 








































Glass 

Book 









»• 




* 


V 
























































i 




S3 












( 








~ 














* 
























. 

















' 










































THE EGOIST 


a Cometig in Narratibe 


BY 

GEORGE MEREDITH 

n 


REVISED EDITION 


NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
1913 



COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY 
GEORGE MEREDITH 














CONTENTS 


CHAP. fXQt 

PRELUDE. A CHAPTER OF WHICH THE LAST PAGE 

ONLY IS OF ANY IMPORTANCE. 1 

I. A MINOR INCIDENT, SHOWING AN HEREDITARY APTI¬ 
TUDE IN THE USE OF THE KNIFE. 6 

II. THE YOUNG SIR WILLOUGHBY ....... 9 

III. CONSTANTIA DURHAM.14 

IV. LiETITIA DALE. 22 

V. CLARA MIDDLETON ..36 

VI. HIS COURTSHIP.45 

VII. THE BETROTHED . 54 

VIII. A RUN WITH THE TRUANT: A WALK WITH THE 

MASTER.67 

IX. CLARA AND LACTITIA MEET: THEY ARE COMPARED. 75 

X. IN WHICH SIR WILLOUGHBY CHANCES TO SUPPLY 

THE TITLE FOR HIMSELF.86 

XI. THE DOUBLE-BLOSSOM WILD CHERRY-TREE . . . 102 

XII. MISS MIDDLETON AND MR. VERNON WHITFORD . . 114 

XIII. THE FIRST EFFORT AFTER FREEDOM.120 

XIV. SIR WILLOUGHBY AND ..132 

XV. THE PETITION FOR A RELEASE.14J 

XVI. CLARA AND L^TITIA. 152 

XVII. THE PORCELAIN VASE .. 
















VI 


CONTENTS 


CHAP. 

XVIII. 

XIX. 

XX. 

XXI. 

XXII. 

XXIII. 

XXIV. 

XXV. 

XXVI. 

XXVII. 

XXVIII. 

XXIX. 


XXX. 

XXXI. 

XXXII. 

XXXIII. 

XXXIV. 

XXXV. 

XXXVI. 

XXXVII. 

XXXVIII. 

XXXIX. 


COLONEL DE CRAYE . 

COLONEL DE CRAYE AND CLARA MIDDLETON . . 

AN AGED AND A GREAT WINE ....... 

Clara's meditations.* . . 

THE RIDE. 

TREATS of the union of temper and policy . 
contains an instance of the generosity of 

WILLOUGHBY. 

THE FLIGHT IN WILD WEATHER. 

VERNON IN PURSUIT . 

AT THE RAILWAY STATION. 

THE RETURN... 

IN WHICH THE SENSITIVENESS OF SIR WIL¬ 
LOUGHBY IS EXPLAINED: AND HE RECEIVES 

MUCH INSTRUCTION. 

TREATING OF THE DINNER - PARTY AT MRS. 

MOUNTSTUART JENKINSON’S . .. 

SIR WILLOUGHBY ATTEMPTS AND ACHIEVES 

PATHOS . 

LASTITIA DALE DISCOVERS A SPIRITUAL CHANGE, 
AND DR. MIDDLETON A PHYSICAL .... 
IN WHICH THE COMIC MUSE HAS AN EYE ON 

TWO GOOD SOULS. 

MRS. MOUNTSTUART AND SIR WILLOUGHBY . . 

MISS MIDDLETON AND MRS. MOUNTSTUART 
ANIMATED CONVERSATION AT A LUNCHEON-TABLE 
CONTAINS CLEVER FENCING AND INTIMATIONS 

OF THE NEED FOR IT.. . 

IN WHICH WE TAKE A STEP TO THE CENTRE OF 

EGOISM. 

IN THE HEART OF THE EGOIST. 


mi 

168 

177 

188 

199 

211 

223 

235 

247 

263 

268 

277 


285 

804 

313 

824 

333 

341 

354 

370 

881 

391 

396 

















CONTENTS Vii 

CHAP. FA«a 

XL. midnight: sir Willoughby and l^etitia; with 

YOUNG CROSSJAY UNDER A COVERLET .... 403 

XLI. THE REV. DR. MIDDLETON, CLARA, AND SIR WIL¬ 
LOUGHBY .414 

XLII. SHOWS THE DIVINING ARTS OF A PERCEPTIVE MIND . 429 

XLIII. IN WHICH 8IR WILLOUGHBY IS LED TO THINK THAT 

THE ELEMENTS HAVE CONSPIRED AGAINST HIM . 444 

XLIV. DR. MIDDLETON : THE LADIES ELEANOR AND 

ISABEL: AND MR. DALE.459 

XLV. THE PATTERNS LADIES: MR. DALE: LADY BUSSHE 
AND LADY CULMER : WITH MRS. MOUNT8TUART 

JENKINSON.468 

XLVI. THE SCENE OF SIR WILLOUGHBY’S GENERALSHIP . 477 

XLVII. SIR WILLOUGHBY AND HIS FRIEND HORACE DK 

CRAYE.491 

XLVIII. THE LOVERS.501 

XLIX. LjETITIA AND SIR WILLOUGHBY •.•••.• 511 

L» UPON WHICH THE CURTAIN FALLS .... . 620 












THE EGOIST 


PRELUDE 

A CHAPTER OF WHICH THE LAST PAGE ONLY IS OF ANY 
IMPORTANCE 

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon 
social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing¬ 
room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust 
of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, 
to make the correctness of the representation convincing. 
Credulity is not wooed through the impressionable senses; 
nor have wo recourse to the small circular glow of the 
watchmaker’s eye to raise in bright relief minutest grains 
of evidence for the routing of incredulity. The Comic 
Spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of char¬ 
acters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit 
of them and their speech. For, being a spirit, he hunts 
the spirit in men; vision and ardour constitute his merit: 
he has not a thought of persuading you to believe in 
him. Follow and you will see. But there is a question 
of the value of a run at his heels. 

Now the world is possessed of a certain big book, the 
biggest book on earth; that might indeed be called the 
Book of Earth; whose title is the Book of Egoism, and it 
is a book full of the world’s wisdom. So full of it, and 
of such dimensions is this book, in which the generations 
have written ever since they took to writing, that to be 
profitable to us the Book needs a powerful compression. 

Who, says the notable humourist, in allusion to this 
Book, who can studiously travel through sheets of leaves 
now capable of a stretch from the Lizard to the last few 
poor pulmonary snips and shreds of leagues dancing on 



2 


THE EGOIST 


their toes for cold, explorers tell us, and catching breath 
by good luck, like dogs at bones about a table, on the edge 
of the Pole? Inordinate unvaried length, sheer longin- 
quity, staggers the heart, ages the very heart of us at a 
view. And how if we manage finally to print one of 
our pages on the crow-scalp of that solitary majestic out¬ 
sider ? We may with effort get even him into the Book; 
yet the knowledge we want will not be more present with 
us than it was when the chapters hung their end over the 
cliff you ken of at Dover, where sits our great lord and 
master contemplating the seas without upon the reflex of 
that within! 

In other words, as I venture to translate him (humour¬ 
ists are difficult: it is a piece of their humour to puzzle 
our wits), the inward mirror, the embracing and condens¬ 
ing spirit, is required to give us those interminable mile¬ 
post piles of matter (extending well-nigh to the very Pole) 
in essence, in chosen samples, digestibly. I conceive 
him to indicate that the realistic method of a conscien¬ 
tious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all 
the audible, is mainly accountable for our present bran- 
fulness, and for that prolongation of the vasty and the 
noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams 
the malady of sameness, our modern malady. We have 
the malady, whatever may be the cure or the cause. We 
drove in a body to Science the other day for an antidote; 
which was as if tired pedestrians should mount the engine- 
box of headlong trains; and Science introduced us to our 
o’er-hoary ancestry — them in the Oriental posture: where¬ 
upon we set up a primaeval chattering to rival the Amazon 
forest nigh nightfall, cured, we fancied. And before day¬ 
break our disease was hanging on to us again, with the 
extension of a tail. We had it fore and aft. We were 
the same, and animals into the bargain. That is all we 
got from Science. 

Art is the specific. We have little to learn of apes, and 
they may be left. The chief consideration for us is, what 
particular practice of Art in letters is the best for the 
perusal of the Book of our common wisdom; so that with 
clearer minds and livelier manners we may escape, as it 
were, into daylight and song from a land of fog-horns. 


PRELUDE 


3 


Shall we read it by the watchmakers eye in luminous 
rings eruptive of the infinitesimal, or pointed with exam¬ 
ples and types under the broad Alpine survey of the spirit 
born of our united social intelligence, which is the Comic 
Spirit? Wise men say the latter. They tell us that 
there is a constant tendency in the Book to accumulate 
excess of substance, and such repleteness, obscuring the 
glass it holds to mankind, renders us inexact in the recog¬ 
nition of our individual countenances: a perilous thing for 
civilization. And these wise men are strong in their 
opinion that we should encourage the Comic Spirit, who 
is, after all, our own offspring, to relieve the Book. Com¬ 
edy, they say, is the true diversion, as it is likewise the 
key of the great Book, the music of the Book. They tell 
us how it condenses whole sections of the Book in a sen¬ 
tence, volumes in a character; so that a fair part of a book 
outstripping thousands of leagues when unrolled, may be 
compassed in one comic sitting. 

For verily, say they, we must read what we can of it, 
at least the page before us, if we would be men. One, 
with an index on the Book, cries out, in a style pardonable 
to his fervency: The remedy of your frightful affliction is 
here, through the stillatory of Comedy, and not in Science, 
nor yet in Speed, whose name is but another for voracity. 
Why, to be alive, to be quick in the soul, there should be 
diversity in the companion throbs of your pulses. Interro¬ 
gate them. They lump along like the old lob-legs of Dob¬ 
bin the horse; or do their business like cudgels of carpet- 
thwackers expelling dust, or the cottage-clock pendulum 
teaching the infant hour over midnight simple arithmetic. 
This too in spite of Bacchus. And let them gallop; let 
them gallop with the God bestriding them, gallop to 
Hymen, gallop to Hades, they strike the same note. Mon¬ 
strous monotonousness has enfolded us as with the arms of 
Amphitrite ! We hear a shout of war for a diversion. — 
Comedy he pronounces to be our means of reading swiftly 
and comprehensively. She it is who proposes the correct¬ 
ing of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the 
vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. 
She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook. 
If, he says, she watches over sentimentalism with a birch- 


4 


THE EGOIST 


rod, she is not opposed to romance. You may love, and 
warmly love, so long as you are honest. Do not offend 
reason. A lover pretending too much by one foot’s length 
of pretence, will have that foot caught in her trap. In 
Comedy is the singular scene of charity issuing of disdain 
under the stroke of honourable laughter: an Ariel released 
by Prospero’s wand from the fetters of the damned witch 
Sycorax. And this laughter of reason refreshed is flo- 
riferous, like the magical great gale of the shifty Spring 
deciding for Summer. You hear it giving the delicate 
spirit his liberty. Listen, for comparison, to an unleav¬ 
ened society: a low as of the udderful cow past milking 
hour ! 0 for a titled ecclesiastic to curse to excommuni¬ 

cation that unholy thing! — So far an enthusiast perhaps; 
but he should have a hearing. 

Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without 
pathos; and we are not totally deficient of pathos; which 
is, I do not accurately know what, if not the ballast, 
reducible to moisture by patent process, on board our 
modern vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and the 
general water-supply has other uses; and ships well 
charged with it seem to sail the stiffest: — there is a touch 
of pathos. The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who 
would desire to clothe himself at everybody’s expense, and 
is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark naked, 
he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the 
actual person. Only he is not allowed to rush at you, roll 
you over and squeeze your body for the briny drops. 
There is the innovation. 

You may as well know him out of hand, as a gentleman 
of our time and country, of wealth and station; a not flexile 
figure, do what we may with him; the humour of whom 
scarcely dimples the surface and is distinguishable but by 
very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits of roaring 
below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality, 
have first made the mild literary angels aware of something 
comic in him, when they were one and all about to de¬ 
scribe the gentleman on the heading of the records baldly 
(where brevity is most complimentary) as a gentleman of 
family and property, an idol of a decorous island that 
admires the concrete. Imps have their freakish wicked- 


PRELUDE 


6 


ness in them to kindle detective vision: malignly do they 
love to uncover ridiculousness in imposing figures. Wher¬ 
ever they catch sight of Egoism they pitch their camps, 
they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim their lan¬ 
terns, confident of the ludicrous to come. So confident 
that their grip of an English gentleman, in whom they 
have spied their game, never relaxes until he begins in¬ 
sensibly to frolic and antic, unknown to himself, and 
comes out in the native steam which is their scent of the 
chase. Instantly off they scour, Egoist and imps. They 
will, it is known of them, dog a great House for centuries, 
and be at the birth of all the new heirs in succession, dili¬ 
gently taking confirmatory notes, to join hands and chime 
their chorus in one of their merry rings round the totter, 
ing pillar of the House, when his turn arrives; as if they 
had (possibly they had) smelt of old date a doomed colossus 
of Egoism in that unborn, unconceived inheritor of the 
stuff of the family. They dare not be chuckling while 
Egoism is valiant, while sober, while socially valuable, 
nationally serviceable. They wait. 

Aforetime a grand old Egoism built the House. It would 
appear that ever finer essences of it are demanded to sus¬ 
tain the structure: but especially would it appear that a 
reversion to the gross original, beneath a mask and in a 
vein of fineness, is an earthquake at the foundations of the 
House. Better that it should not have consented to mo¬ 
tion, and have held stubbornly to all ancestral ways, than 
have bred that anachronic spectre. The sight, however, is 
one to make our squatting imps in circle grow restless on 
their haunches, as they bend eyes instantly, ears at full 
cock, for the commencement of the comic drama of the 
suicide. If this line of verse be not yet in our literature. 

Through very love of self himself he slew, 
let it be admitted for his epitaph. 


THE EGOIST 


CHAPTER I 

A MINOR INCIDENT SHOWING AN HEREDITARY APTITUDE 
IN THE USE OF THE KNIFE 

There was an ominously anxious watch of eyes visible 
and invisible over the infancy of Willoughby, fifth in 
descent from Simon Pa ttern ed of Patterne Hall, premier 
of this family, a lawyerJ*lTman of solid acquirements and 
stout ambition, who well understood the foundation-work 
of a House, and was endowed with the power of saying 
No to those first agents of destruction, besieging relatives. 
He said it with the resonant emphasis of death to younger 
sons. For if the oak is to become a stately tree, we must 
provide against the crowding of timber. Also the tree 
beset with parasites prospers not. A great House in its 
beginning lives, we may truly say, by the knife. Soil is 
easily got, and so are bricks, and a wife, and children 
come of wishing for them, but the vigorous use of the 
knife is a natural gift and points to growth. Pauper 
Patternes were numerous when the fifth head of the race 
was the hope of his county. A Patterne was in the 
Marines. 

The country and the chief of this family were simul¬ 
taneously informed of the existence of one Lieutenant 
Crossjay Patterne, of the corps of the famous hard fighters, 
through an act of heroism of the unpretending cool sort 
which kindles British blood, on the part of the modest 
young officer, in the storming of some eastern riverain 
stronghold, somewhere about the coast of China. The 
officer’s youth was assumed on the strength of his rank, 
perhaps likewise from the tale of his modesty: “he had 
only done his duty.” Our Willoughby was then at Col¬ 
lege, emulous of the generous enthusiasm of his years, and 
strangely impressed by the report, and the printing of his 
name in the newspapers. He thought over it for several 
months, when, coming to his title and heritage, he sent 
Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne a cheque for a sum of monej 
amounting to the gallant fellow’s pay per annum, at tlfi 


A MINOR INCIDENT 


7 


same time showing his acquaintance with the first, or 
chemical, principles of generosity, in the remark to friends 
at home, that “blood is thicker than water.” The man is 
a Marine, but he is a Patterne. How any Patterne should 
have drifted into the Marines, is of the order of questions 
which are senselessly asked of the great dispensary. In 
the complimentary letter accompanying his cheque, the 
lieutenant was invited to present himself at the ancestral 
Hall, when convenient to him, and he was assured that he 
had given his relative and friend a taste for a soldier’s 
life. Young Sir Willoughby was fond of talking of his 
“military namesake and distant cousin, young Patterne — 
the Marine.” It was funny; and not less laughable was 
the description of his namesake’s deed of valour: with the 
rescued British sailor inebriate, and the hauling off to 
captivity of the three braves of the black dragon on a yel¬ 
low ground, and the tying of them together back to back by 
their pigtails, and driving of them into our lines upon a 
newly devised dying-top style of march that inclined to 
the oblique, like the astonished six eyes of the celestial 
prisoners, for straight they could not go. The humour of 
gentlemen at home is always highly excited by such cool 
feats. We are a small island, but you see what we do. 
The ladies at the Hall, Sir Willoughby’s mother, and his 
aunts Eleanor and Isabel, were more affected than he by 
the circumstance of their having a Patterne in the 
Marines. But how then! We English have ducal blood 
in business: we have, genealogists tell us, royal blood in 
common trades. For all our pride we are a queer people; 
and you may be ordering butcher’s meat of a Tudor, sit¬ 
ting on the cane-bottom chairs of a Plantagenet. By and 
by you may . . . but cherish your reverence. Young 
Willoughby made a kind of shock-head or football hero of 
his gallant distant cousin, and wondered occasionally that 
the fellow had been content to despatch a letter of effusive 
thanks without availing himself of the invitation to par¬ 
take of the hospitalities of Patterne. 

He was one afternoon parading between showers on the 
stately garden terrace of the Hall, in company with his 
affianced, the beautiful and dashing Constantia Durham, 
followed by knots of ladies and gentlemen vowed to fresh 


THE EGOIST 


air before dinner, while it was to be had. Chancing with 
his usual happy fortune (we call these things dealt to us 
out of the great hidden dispensary, chance) to glance up 
the avenue of limes, as he was in the act of turning on 
his heel at the end of the terrace, and it should be added, 
discoursing with passion’s privilege of the passion of love 
to Miss Durham, Sir Willo .ghby, who was anything but 
obtuse, experienced a presentiment upon espying a thick¬ 
set stumpy man crossing the gravel space from the avenue 
to the front steps of the Hall, decidedly not bearing the 
stamp of the gentleman “on his hat, his coat, his feet, or 
anything that was his,” Willoughby subsequently observed 
to the ladies of his family in the Scriptural style of gentle¬ 
men who do bear the stamp. His brief sketch of the crea¬ 
ture was repulsive. The visitor carried a bag, and his 
coat-collar was up, his hat was melancholy; he had the 
appearance of a bankrupt tradesman absconding; no gloves, 
no umbrella. 

As to the incident we have to note, it was very slight. 
The card of Lieutenant Patterne was handed to Sir Wil¬ 
loughby, who laid it on the salver, saying to the footman, 
“Not at home.” 

He had been disappointed in the age, grossly deceived 
in the appearance of the man claiming to be his relative 
in this unseasonable fashion; and his acute instinct ad¬ 
vised him swiftly of the absurdity of introducing to his 
friends a heavy unpresentable senior as the celebrated 
gallant Lieutenant of Marines, and the same as a member 
of his family! He had talked of the man too much, too 
enthusiastically, to be able to do so. A young subaltern, 
even if passably vulgar in figure, can be shuffled through 
by the aid of the heroical story humourously exaggerated 
in apology for his aspect. Nothing can be done with a 
mature and stumpy Marine of that rank. Considerateness 
dismisses him on the spot, without parley. It was per¬ 
formed by a gentleman supremely advanced at a very early 
age in the art of cutting. 

Young Sir Willoughby spoke a word of the rejected visi¬ 
tor to Miss Durham, in response to her startled look: “ I 
shall drop him a cheque,” he said, for she seemed person¬ 
ally wounded, and had a face of crimson. 


THE YOUNG SIR WILLOUGHBY 


9 


The young lady did not reply. 

Dating from the humble departure of Lieutenant Cross¬ 
jay Patterne up the limes-avenue under a gathering rain- 
cloud, the ring of imps in attendance on Sir Willoughby 
maintained their station with strict observation of his 
movements at all hours; and were comparisons in quest, 
the sympathetic eagerness of the eyes of caged monkeys 
for the hand about to feed them, would supply one. They 
perceived in him a fresh development and very subtle 
manifestation of the very old thing from which he had 
sprung. 


CHAPTER II 

THE YOUNG SIR WILLOUGHBY 

These little scoundrel imps, who have attained to some 
respectability as the dogs and pets of the Comic Spirit, 
had been curiously attentive three years earlier, long be¬ 
fore the public announcement of his engagement to the 
beautiful Miss Durham, on the day of Sir Willoughby’s 
majority, when Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson said her word 
of him. Mrs. Mountstuart was a lady certain to say the 
remembered, if not the right, thing. Again and again was 
it confirmed on days of high celebration, days of birth or 
bridal, how sure she was to hit the mark that rang the bell; 
and away her word went over the county: and had she been 
an uncharitable woman she could have ruled the county 
with an iron rod of caricature, so sharp was her touch. A 
grain of malice would have sent county faces and characters 
awry into the currency. She was wealthy and kindly, and 
resembled our mother Nature in her reasonable antipa¬ 
thies to one or two things which none can defend, and her 
decided preference of persons that shone in the sun. Her 
word sprang out of her. She looked at you, and forth it 
came: and it stuck to you, as nothing laboured or literary 
could have adhered. Her saying of Lsetitia Dale: “Here 
she comes, with a romantic tale on her eyelashes,” was a 
portrait of Laetitia. And that of Vernon Whitford: “He is 



10 


THE EGOIST 


a Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar,” painted the sunken 
brilliancy of the lean long-walker and scholar at a stroke. 

Of the young Sir Willoughby, her word was brief; and 
there was the merit of it on a day when he was hearing 
from sunrise to the setting of the moon salutes in hi£ 
honour, songs of praise and Ciceronian eulogy. Kich, 
handsome, courteous, generous, lord of the Hall, the feast, - 
and the dance, he excited his guests of both sexes to a 
holiday of flattery. And, says Mrs. Mountstuart, while 
grand phrases were mouthing round about him: “ You see 
he has a leg.” 

That you saw, of course. But after she had spoken you 
saw much more. Mrs. Mountstuart said it just as others 
utter empty nothings, with never a hint of a stress. Her 
word was taken up, and very soon, from the extreme end 
of the long drawing-room, the circulation of something 
of Mrs. Mountstuart’s was distinctly perceptible. Lady 
Patterne sent a little Hebe down, skirting the dancers, for 
an accurate report of it; and even the inappreciative lips of 
a very young lady transmitting the word could not damp 
the impression of its weighty truthfulness. It was per¬ 
fect! Adulation of the young Sir Willoughby’s beauty and 
wit, and aristocratic bearing and mien, and of his moral 
virtues, was common: welcome if you like, as a form of 
homage; but common, almost vulgar, beside Mrs. Mount¬ 
stuart’s quiet little touch of nature. In seeming to say 
infinitely less than others, as Miss Isabel Patterne pointed 
out to Lady Busshe, ; Mrs. Mountstuart comprised all that 
the others had said, by showing the needlessness of allu¬ 
sions to the saliently evident. She was the aristocrat 
reproving the provincial. “He is everything you have 
had the goodness to remark, ladies and dear sirs, he talks 
charmingly, dances divinely, rides with the air of a com¬ 
mander-in-chief, has the most natural grand pose possible 
without ceasing for a moment to be the young English 
gentleman he is. Alcibiades, fresh from a Louis IV. 
perruquier, could not shrpass him: whatever you please; 

I could outdo you in sublime comparisons, were I minded 
to pelt him. Have you noticed that he has a leg ? ” 

So might it be amplified. A simple-seeming word of 
this import is the triumph of the spiritual, and where it 


THE YOUNG SIR WILLOUGHBY 


11 


passes for coin of value, the society has reached a high 
refinement: Arcadian by the aesthetic route. Observation 
of Willoughby was not, as Miss Eleanor Patterne pointed 
out to Lady Culmer, drawn down to the leg, but directed 
to estimate him from the leg upward. That, however, is 
prosaic. Dwell a short space on Mrs. Mountstuart’s word; 
and whither, into what fair region, and with how deco¬ 
rously voluptuous a sensation, do not we fly, who have, 
through mournful veneration of the Martyr Charles, a coy 
attachment to the Court of his Merrie Son, where the leg 
was ribanded with love-knots and reigned. Oh! it was a 
naughty Court. Yet have we dreamed of it as the period 
when an English cavalier was grace incarnate; far from 
the boor now hustling us in another sphere; beautifully 
mannered, every gesture dulcet. And if the ladies were 
... we will hope they have been traduced. But if they 
were, if they were too tender, ah! gentlemen were gentle¬ 
men then — worth perishing for ! There is this dream in 
the English country; and it must be an aspiration after 
some form of melodious gentlemanliness which is imagined 
to have inhabited the island at one time; as among our 
poets the dream of the period of a circle of chivalry here 
is encouraged for the pleasure of the imagination. 

Mrs. Mountstuart touched a thrilling chord. “In spite 
of men’s hateful modern costume, you see he has a leg.” 

That is, the leg of the born cavalier is before you: and 
obscure it as you will, dress degenerately, there it is for 
ladies who have eyes. You see it: or, you see he has it. 
Miss Isabel and Miss Eleanor disputed the incidence of 
the emphasis, but surely, though a slight difference of 
meaning may be heard, either will do: many, with a good 
show of reason, throw the accent upon leg. And the 
ladies knew for a fact that Willoughby’s leg was exquisite; 
he had a cavalier court-suit in his wardrobe. Mrs. 
Mountstuart signified that the leg was to be seen because 
it was a burning leg. There it is, and it will shine 
through! He has the leg of Rochester, Buckingham,.- 
Dorset, Suckling; the leg that smiles, that winks, isj fr 9 
obsequious to you, yet perforce of beauty self-satisfied*/ 
that twinkles to a tender midway between imperiousness 
and seductiveness, audacity and discretion; between “you 


12 


THE EGOIST 


shall worship me,” and “I am devoted to you;” is your 
lord, your slave, alternately and in one. It is a leg of 
ebb and flow and high-tide ripples. Such a leg, when it 
has done with pretending to retire, will walk straight into 
the hearts of women. Nothing so fatal to them. 

Self-satisfied it must be. Humbleness does not win 
multitudes or the sex. It must be vain to have a sheen. 
Captivating melodies (to prove to you the unavoidableness 
of self-satisfaction when you know that you have hit per¬ 
fection), listen to them closely, have an inner pipe of that 
conceit almost ludicrous when you detect the chirp. 

And you need not be reminded that he has the leg with¬ 
out the naughtiness. You see eminent in him what we 
would fain have brought about in a nation that has lost 
its leg in gaining a possibly cleaner morality. And that 
is often contested; but there is no doubt of the loss of the 
leg. 

Well, footmen and courtiers and Scottish highlanders, 
and the corps de ballet, draymen too, have legs, and star¬ 
ing legs, shapely enough. But what are they ? not the 
modulated instrument we mean — simply legs for leg-work, 
dumb as the brutes. Our cavalier’s is the poetic leg, a 
portent, a valiance. He has it as Cicero had a tongue. 
It is a lute to scatter songs to his mistress; a rapier, is 
she obdurate. In sooth a leg with brains in it, soul. 

And its shadows are an ambush, its lights a surprise. It 
blushes, it pales, can whisper, exclaim. It is a peep, a 
part revelation, just sufferable, of the Olympian god — 
Jove playing carpet-knight. 

For the young Sir Willoughby’s family and his thought¬ 
ful admirers, it is not too much to say that Mrs. Mount- 
stuart’s little word fetched an epoch of our history to 
colour the evening of his arrival at man’s estate. He was 
all that Merrie Charles’s Court should have been, subtract¬ 
ing not a sparkle from what it was. Under this light 
he danced, and you may consider the effect of it on his 
company. 

He had received the domestic education of a prince. 
Little princes abound in a land of heaped riches. Where 
they have not to yield military service to an Imperial 
master, they are necessarily here and there dainty during 


THE YOUNG SIR WILLOUGHBY 


13 


youth, sometimes unmanageable, and as they are bound in 
no personal duty to the State, each is for himself, with 
full present, and what is more, luxurious prospective 
leisure for the practice of that allegiance. They are 
sometimes enervated by it: that must be in continental 
countries. Happily our climate and our brave blood 
precipitate the greater number upon the hunting-field, to 
do the public service of heading the chase of the fox, with 
benefit to their constitutions. Hence a manly as well as 
useful race of little princes, and Willoughby was as manly 
as any. He cultivated himself, he would not be outdone 
in popular accomplishments. Had the standard of the 
public taste been set in philosophy, and the national enthu¬ 
siasm centred in philosophers, he would at least have 
worked at books. He did work at science, and had a 
laboratory. His admirable passion to excel, however, was 
chiefly directed in his youth upon sport; and so great was 
the passion in him, that it was commonly the presence of 
rivals which led him to the declaration of love. 

He knew himself nevertheless to be the most constant 
of men in his attachment to the sex. He had never dis¬ 
couraged Lsetitia Dale’s devotion to him, and even when 
he followed in the sweeping tide of the beautiful Con- 
stantia Durham (whom Mrs. Mountstuart called “The 
Racing Cutter ”), he thought of Laetitia, and looked at 
her. She was a shy violet. 

Willoughby’s comportment while the showers of adula¬ 
tion drenched him might be likened to the composure of 
Indian Gods undergoing worship, but unlike them he re¬ 
posed upon no seat of amplitude to preserve him from a 
betrayal of intoxication; he had to continue tripping, 
dancing, exactly balancing himself, head to right, head 
to left, addressing his idolaters in phrases of perfect 
choiceness. This is only to say, that it is easier to be a 
wooden idol than one in the flesh; yet Willoughby was 
equal to his task. The little prince’s education teaches 
him that he is other than you, and by virtue of the in¬ 
struction he receives, and also something, we know not 
what, within, he is enabled to maintain his posture where 
you would be tottering. Urchins upon whose curly pates 
grey seniors lay their hands with conventional encomium 


14 


THE EGOIST 


and speculation look older than they are immediately! 
and Willoughby looked older than his years, not for want 
of freshness, but because he felt that he had to stand 
eminently and correctly poised. 

Hearing of Mrs. Mountstuart’s word on him, he smiled 
and said: “It is at her service.” 

The speech was communicated to her, and she proposed 
to attach a dedicatory strip of silk. And then they came 
together, and there was wit and repartee suitable to the 
electrical atmosphere of the dancing-room, on the march 
to a magical hall of supper. Willoughby conducted Mrs. 
Mountstuart to the supper-table. 

“Were I,” said she, “twenty years younger, I think I 
would marry you, to cure my infatuation.” 

“Then let me tell you in advance, madam,” said he, 
“that I will do everything to obtain a new lease of it, 
except divorce you.” 

They were infinitely wittier, but so much was heard 
and may be reported. 

“It makes the business of choosing a wife for him super¬ 
humanly difficult! ” Mrs. Mountstuart observed, after lis¬ 
tening to the praises she had set going again when the 
ladies were weeded of us, in Lady Patterne’s Indian room, 
and could converse unhampered upon their own ethereal 
themes. 

“Willoughby will choose a wife for himself,” said his 
mother. 


CHAPTEK III 

CONSTANTIA DURHAM 

The great question for the county was debated in many 
households, daughter-thronged and daughterless, long 
subsequent to the memorable day of Willoughby’s coming 
of age. Lady Busshe was for Constantia Durham. She 
laughed at Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson’s notion of 
Lsetitia Dale. She was a little older than Mrs. Mount¬ 
stuart, and had known Willoughby’s father, whose marriage 



CONSTANTIA DURHAM 


lb 


into the wealthiest branch of the Whitford family had 
been strictly sagacious. “Patternes marry money: they 
are not romantic people,” she said. Miss Durham had 
money, and she had health and" beauty: three mighty 
qualifications for a Patterne bride. Her father, Sir John 
Durham, was a large landowner in the western division of 
the county; a pompous gentleman, the picture of a father- 
in-law for Willoughby. The father of Miss Dale was a 
battered army surgeon from India, tenant of one of Sir 
Willoughby’s cottages bordering Patterne Park. His 
girl was portionless and a poetess. Her writing of the 
song in celebration of the young baronet’s birthday was 
thought a clever venture, bold as only your timid creatures 
can be bold. She let the cat out of her bag of verse be¬ 
fore the multitude; she almost proposed to her hero in 
her rhymes. [She was pretty; her eyelashes were long 
and dark, her eyes dark blue, and her soul was ready 
to shoot like a rocket out of them at a look from Wilt 
loughby. And he looked, he certainly looked, though he 
did not dance with her once that night, and danced re¬ 
peatedly with Miss Durham. He gave Laetitia to Vernon 
Whitford for the final dance of the night, and he may have 
looked at her so much in pity of an elegant girl allied to 
such a partner. The “ Phoebus Apollo turned fasting 
friar ” had entirely forgotten his musical gifts in motion. 
He crossed himself and crossed his bewildered lady, and 
crossed everybody in the figure, extorting shouts of cordial 
laughter from his cousin Willoughby. Be it said that the 
hour was four in the morning, when dancers must laugh at 
somebody, if only to refresh their feet, and the wit of the 
hour administers to the wildest laughter. Vernon was 
likened to Theseus in the maze, entirely dependent upon 
his Ariadne; to a fly released from a jam-pot; to a “sal¬ 
vage,” or green, man caught in a web of nymphs and 
made to go the paces. Willoughby was inexhaustible in 
the happy similes he poured out to Miss Durham across 
the lines of Sir Roger de Coverley, and they were not 
forgotten, they procured him a reputation as a convivial 
sparkler. Rumour went the round that he intended to 
give Lsetitia to Vernon for good, when he could decide to 
<vake Miss Durham to himself; his generosity was famous; 


16 


THE EGOIST 


but that decision, though the rope was in the form of a 
knot, seemed reluctant for the conclusive close haul; it 
preferred the state of slackness; and if he courted Laetitia 
on behalf of his cousin, his cousinly love must have been 
greater than his passion, one had to suppose. He was 
generous enough for it, or for marrying the portionless 
girl himself. 

There was a story of a brilliant young widow of our 
aristocracy who had very nearly snared him. Why should 
he object to marry into our aristocracy ? Mrs. Mountstuart 
asked him, and he replied, that the girls of that class have 
no money, and he doubted the quality of their blood. He 
had his eyes awake. His duty to his House was a fore¬ 
most thought with him, and for such a reason he may have 
been more anxious to give the slim and not robust Laetitia 
to Vernon than accede to his personal inclination. The 
mention of the widow singularly offended him, notwith¬ 
standing the high rank of the lady named. “A widow ?” 
he said. “I!” He spoke to a widow; an oldish one truly; 
but his wrath at the suggestion of his union with a widow, 
led him to be for the moment oblivious of the minor 
shades of good taste. He desired Mrs. Mountstuart to 
contradict the story in positive terms. He repeated his 
desire; he was urgent to have it contradicted, and said 
again, “A widow!” straightening his whole figure to the 
erectness of the letter I. She was a widow unmarried a 
second time, and it has been known of the stedfast women 
who retain the name of their first husband, or do not 
hamper his title with a little new squire at their skirts, 
that they can partially approve the objections indicated 
by Sir Willoughby. They are thinking of themselves 
when they do so, and they will rarely say, “I might have 
married;” rarely within them will they avow that, with 
their permission, it might have been. They can catch 
an idea of a gentleman’s view of the widow’s cap. But 
a niceness that could feel sharply wounded by the simple 
rumour of his alliance with the young relict of an earl, 
was mystifying. Sir Willoughby unbent. His military 
letter I took a careless glance at itself lounging idly and 
proudly at ease in the glass of his mind, decked with a 
wanton wreath, as he dropped a hint, generously vague, 


CONST ANTI A DURHAM 


17 


just to show the origin of the rumour, and the excellent 
basis it had for not being credited. He was chidden. 
Mrs. Mountstuart read him a lecture. She was however 
able to contradict the tale of the young countess. “There 
is no fear of his marrying her, my dears.” 

Meanwhile there was a fear that he would lose his 
chance of marrying the beautiful Miss Durham. 

The dilemmas of little princes are often grave. They 
should be dwelt on now and then for an example to poor 
struggling commoners of the slings and arrows assailing 
fortune’s most favoured men, that we may preach content¬ 
ment to the wretch who cannot muster wherewithal to 
marry a wife, or has done it and trots the streets, pack¬ 
laden, to maintain the dame and troops of children pain¬ 
fully reared to fill subordinate stations. According to our 
reading, a moral is always welcome in a moral country, 
and especially so when silly envy is to b^ chastised by it, 
the restless craving for change rebuked. ( Young Sir Wil¬ 
loughby, then, stood in this dilemma : a lady was at 
either hand of him; the only two that had ever, apart from 
metropolitan conquests, not to be recited, touched his 
emotions. / Susceptible to beauty, he had never seen so 
beautiful a! girl as Constantia Durham. Equally suscep¬ 
tible to admiration of himself, he considered Laetitia Dale 
a paragon of cleverness. I|e stood between the queenly) 
rose and the modest violet. One he bowed to; the othef 
bowed to him. He could foot have both; it is the law 
governing princes and pedestrians alike. But which could 
he forfeit? His growing acquaintance with the world 
taught him to put an increasing price on the sentiments 
of Miss Dale. Still Constantia’s beauty was of a kind to 
send away beholders aching. She had the glory of the 
racing cutter full sail on a winning breeze; and she did 
not court to win him, she flew. In his more reflective hour 
the attractiveness of that lady which held the mirror to 
his features was paramount. But he had passionate 
snatches when the magnetism of the flyer drew him in her 
wake. Further to add to the complexity, he loved his 
liberty; he was princelier free; he had more subjects, 
more slaves; he ruled arrogantly in the world of women; 
he was more himself His metropolitan experiences did 


18 


THE EGOIST 


not answer to his liking the particular question, Do we 
bind the woman down to us idolatrously by making a wife 
of her ? 

In the midst of his deliberations, a report of the hot 
pursuit of Miss Durham, casually mentioned to him by 
Lady Busshe, drew an immediate proposal from Sir Wil¬ 
loughby. She accepted him, and they were engaged. She 
had been nibbled at, all but eaten up, while he hung dubi- 
tative; and though that was the cause of his winning her, 
it offended his niceness. She had not come to him out of 
cloistral purity, out of perfect radiancy. Spiritually, 
likewise, was he a little prince, a despotic prince. He 
wished for her to have come to him out of an egg-shell, 
somewhat more astonished at things than a chicken, but 
as completely enclosed before he tapped the shell, and 
seeing him with her sex’s eyes first of all men. She talked 
frankly of her cousins and friends, young males. She 
could have replied to his bitter wish: “ Had you asked me 
on the night of your twenty-first birthday, Willoughby! ” 
Since then she had been in the dust of the world, and he 
conceived his peculiar antipathy, destined to be so fatal 
to him, from the earlier hours of his engagement. He was 
quaintly incapable of a jealousy of individuals. A young 
Captain Oxford had been foremost in the swarm pursuing 
Constantia. Willoughby thought as little of Captain 
Oxford as he did of Vernon Whitford. His enemy was 
the world, the mass, which confounds us in a lump, which 
has breathed on her whom we have selected, whom we 
cannot, can never, rub quite clear of her contact with the 
abominated crowd. The pleasure of the world is to bowl 
down our soldierly letter I; to encroach on our identity, 
soil our niceness. To begin to think is the beginning of 
disgust of the world. 

As soon as the engagement was published, all the county 
said that there had not been a chance for Laetitia, and Mrs. 
Mountstuart Jenkinson humbly remarked, in an attitude 
of penitence, “I'm not a witch.” Lady Busshe could 
claim to be one; she had foretold the event. Laetitia was 
of the same opinion as the county. She had looked up, 
but not hopefully. She had only looked up to the bright¬ 
est, and, as he was the highest, how could she have hoped ? 


CONSTANTIA DURHAM 


19 


She was the solitary companion of a sick father, whose 
inveterate prognostic of her, that she would live to rule at 
Patterne Hall, tortured the poor girl in proportion as he 
seemed to derive comfort from it. The noise of the engage¬ 
ment merely silenced him; recluse invalids cling obsti¬ 
nately to their ideas. He had observed Sir Willoughby in 
the society of his daughter, when the young baronet re¬ 
vived to a sprightly boyishness immediately. Indeed, 
as big boy and little girl, they had played together of old. 
Willoughby had been a handsome fair boy. The portrait 
of him at the Hall, in a hat, leaning on his pony, with 
crossed legs and long flaxen curls over his shoulders, was 
the image of her souPs most present angel; and, as a man, 
he had — she did not suppose intentionally — subjected 
her nature to bow to him; so submissive was she, that it 
was fuller happiness for her to think him right in all his 
actions than to imagine the circumstances different. This 
may appear to resemble the ecstacy of the devotee of 
Juggernaut. It is a form of the passion inspired by little 
princes, and we need not marvel that a conservative sex 
should assist to keep them in their lofty places. What 
were there otherwise to look up to? We should have no 
dazzling beacon-lights if they were levelled and treated as 
clod earth and it is worth while for here and there a 
woman to be burnt, so long as women’s general adoration 
of an ideal young man shall be preserved. Purity is our 
demand of them. They may justly cry for attraction. 
They cannot have it brighter than in the universal bearing 
of the eyes of their sisters upon a little prince, one who 
has the ostensible virtues in his pay, and can practise 
them without injuring himself to make himself unsightly. 
Let the races of men be by-and-by astonished at their 
Gods, if they please. Meantime they had better continue 
to worship. 

Laetitia did continue. She saw Miss Durham at Pat¬ 
terne on several occasions. She admired the pair. She 
had a wish to witness the bridal ceremony. She was 
looking forward to the day with that mixture of eagerness 
and withholding which we have as we draw nigh the dis¬ 
enchanting termination of an enchanting romance, when 
Sir Willoughby met her on a Sunday morning, as she 


20 


THE EGOIST 


crossed his park solitarily to church. They were within 
ten days of the appointed ceremony. He should have 
been away at Miss Durham’s end of the county. He had, 
Laetitia knew, ridden over to her the day before; but 
here he was; and very unwontedly, quite surprisingly, he 
presented his arm to conduct Laetitia to the church-door, 
and talked and laughed in a way that reminded her of a 
hunting gentleman she had seen once rising to his feet, 
staggering from an ugly fall across hedge and fence into 
one of the lanes of her short winter walks: “All’s well, 
all sound, never better, only a scratch! ” the gentleman 
had said, as he reeled and pressed a bleeding head. Sir 
Willoughby chattered of his felicity in meeting her. “I 
am really wonderfully lucky,” he said, and he said that 
and other things over and over, incessantly talking, and 
telling an anecdote of county occurrences, and laughing at 
it with a mouth that would not widen. He went on talk¬ 
ing in the church porch, and murmuring softly some steps 
up the aisle, passing the pews of Mrs. Mountstuart Jen- 
kinson and Lady Busshe. Of course he was entertaining, 
but what a strangeness it was to Laetitia! His face would 
have been half under an antique bonnet. It came very 
close to hers, and the scrutiny he bent on her was most 
solicitous. 

After the service, he avoided the great ladies by saun¬ 
tering up to within a yard or two of where she sat; he 
craved her hand on his arm to lead her forth by the park 
entrance to the church, all the while bending to her, dis¬ 
coursing rapidly, appearing radiantly interested in her 
quiet replies, with fits of intentness that stared itself out 
into dim abstraction. She hazarded the briefest replies 
for fear of not having understood him. 

One question she asked: “Miss Durham is well, I 
trust ? ” 

And he answered, “ Durham ? ” and said, “ There is no 
Miss Durham to my knowledge.” 

The impression he left with her was, that he might 
yesterday during his ride have had an accident and fallen 
on his head. 

She would have asked that, if she had not known him 
for so thorough an Englishman, in his dislike to have it 


CONSTANTIA DURHAM 21 

thought that accidents could hurt even when they hap* 
pened to him. 

He called the next day to claim her for a walk. He 
assured her she had promised it, and he appealed to her 
father, who could not testify to a promise he had not heard, 
but begged her to leave him to have her walk. So once 
more she was in the park with Sir Willoughby, listening 
to his raptures over old days. A word of assent from her 
sufficed him. “ I am now myself,” was one of the remarks 
he repeated this day. She dilated on the beauty of the 
Park and the Hall to gratify him. 

He did not speak of Miss Durham, and Laetitia became 
afraid to mention her name. 

At their parting, Willoughby promised Laetitia that he 
would call on the morrow. He did not come; and she 
could well excuse him, after her hearing of the tale. 

It was a lamentable tale. He had ridden to Sir John 
Durham’s mansion, a distance of thirty miles, to hear, on 
his arrival, that Constantia had quitted her father’s house 
two days previously on a visit to an aunt in London, and 
had just sent word that she was the wife of Captain Oxford, 
hussar, and messmate of one of her brothers. A letter 
from the bride awaited Willoughby at the Hall. He had 
ridden back at night, not caring how he used his horse in 
order to get swiftly home, so forgetful of himself was he 
under the terrible blow. That was the night of Saturday. 
On the day following, being Sunday, he met Laetitia in 
his park, led her to church, led her out of it, and the day 
after that, previous to his disappearance for some weeks, 
was walking with her in full view of the carriages along 
the road. 

He had indeed, you see, been very fortunately, if not 
considerately, liberated by Miss Durham. He, as a man 
of honour, could not have taken the initiative, but the 
frenzy of a jealous girl might urge her to such a course; 
and how little he suffered from it had been shown to the 
world. Miss Durham, the story went, was his mother’s 
choice for him, against his heart’s inclinations; which had 
finally subdued Lady Patterne. Consequently, there was 
no longer an obstacle between Sir Willoughby and Miss 
Dale. It was a pleasant and romantic story, and it put 


22 


THE EGOIST 


most people in good humour with the county's favourite, 
as his choice of a portionless girl of no position would 
not have done without the shock of astonishment at the 
conduct of Miss Durham, and the desire to feel that so 
prevailing a gentleman was not in any degree pitiable. 
Constantia was called “that mad thing." Laetitia broke 
forth in novel and abundant merits; and one of the chief 
points of requisition in relation to Patterne — a Lady 'Wil¬ 
loughby who would entertain well and animate the dead¬ 
ness of the Hall, became a certainty when her gentleness 
and liveliness and exceeding cleverness were considered. 
She was often a visitor at the Hall by Lady Patterne’s 
express invitation, and sometimes on these occasions Wil¬ 
loughby was there too, superintending the fitting up of 
his laboratory, though he was not at home to the county; 
it was not expected that he should be yet. He had taken 
heartily to the pursuit of science, and spoke of little else. 
Science, he said, was in our days the sole object worth a 
devoted pursuit. But the sweeping remark could hardly 
apply to Lmtitia, of whom he was the courteous quiet 
wooer you behold when a man has broken loose from an 
unhappy tangle to return to the lady of his first and 
strongest affections. 

Some months of homety courtship ensued, and then, the 
decent interval prescribed by the situation having elapsed, 
Sir Willoughby Patterne left his native land on a tour of 
the globe. 


CHAPTER IV 

L-35TITIA DALE 

That was another surprise to the county. 

Let us not inquire into the feelings of patiently starv¬ 
ing women: they must obtain some sustenance of their 
own, since, as you perceive, they live; evidently they 
are not in need of a great amount of nourishment; and 
we may set them down for creatures with a rushlight of 
animal fire to warm them. They cannot have much vitality 



L^TITIA DALE 


23 


who are so little exclamatory. A corresponding sentiment 
of patient compassion, akin to scorn, is provoked by per¬ 
sons having the opportunity for pathos and declining to use 
it. The public bosom was open to Lsetitia for several 
weeks, and had she run to it to betvail herself, she would 
have been cherished in thankfulness for a country drama. 
There would have been a party against her, cold people, 
critical of her pretensions to rise from an unrecognized 
sphere to be mistress of Patterne Hall; but there would 
also have been a party against Sir Willoughby, composed 
of the two or three revolutionists, tired of the yoke, which 
are to be found in England when there is a stir; a larger 
number of born sympathetics, ever ready to yield the tear 
for the tear; and here and there a Samaritan soul prompt 
to succour poor humanity in distress. The opportunity 
passed undramatized. Lsetitia presented herself at church 
with a face mildly devout, according to her custom, and 
she accepted invitations to the Hall, she assisted at the 
reading of Willoughby’s letters to his family, and fed on 
dry husks of him wherein her name was not mentioned; 
never one note of the summoning call for pathos did this 
young lady blow. 

So, very soon the public bosom closed. She had, under 
the fresh interpretation of affairs, too small a spirit to be 
Lady Willoughby of Patterne; she could not have enter¬ 
tained becomingly; he must have seen that the girl was 
not the match for him in station, and off he went to con¬ 
quer the remainder of a troublesome first attachment, no 
longer extremely disturbing, to judge from the tenour of 
his letters: really incomparable letters! Lady Busshe 
and Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson enjoyed a perusal of them. 
Sir Willoughby appeared as a splendid young representa¬ 
tive island lord in these letters to his family, despatched 
from the principal cities of the United States of America. 
He would give them a sketch of “our democratic cousins,” 
he said. Such cousins ! They might all have been in the 
Marines. He carried his English standard over that Con¬ 
tinent, and by simply jotting down facts, he left an idea of 
the results of the measurement to his family and friends 
at home. He was an adept in the irony of incongruously 
grouping. The nature of the Equality under the stars 


24 


THE EGOIST 


and stripes was presented in this manner. Equality! 
Reflections came occasionally: “These cousins of ours are 
highly amusing. I am among the descendants of the 
Roundheads. Now and then an allusion to old domestic 
differences, in perfect good temper. We go on in our 
way; they theirs, in the apparent belief that Republican¬ 
ism operates remarkable changes in human nature. Ver¬ 
non tries hard to think it does. The upper ten of our 
cousins are the Infernal of Paris. The rest of them is 
Radical England, as far as I am acquainted with that 
section of my country.” — Where we compared, they were 
absurd; where we contrasted, they were monstrous. The 
contrast of Vernon’s letters with Willoughby’s was just as 
extreme. You could hardly have taken them for relatives 
travelling together, or Vernon Whitford for a born and 
bred Englishman. The same scenes furnished by these 
two pens might have been sketched in different hemi¬ 
spheres. Vernon had no irony. He had nothing of Wil¬ 
loughby’s epistolary creative power, which, causing his 
family and friends to exclaim, “How like him that is! ” 
conjured them across the broad Atlantic to behold and 
clap hands at his lordliness. 

They saw him distinctly, as with the naked eye: a 
word, a turn of the pen, or a word unsaid, offered the pic¬ 
ture of him in America, Japan, China, Australia, nay, the 
Continent of Europe, holding an English review of his 
Maker’s grotesques. Vernon seemed a sheepish fellow, 
without stature abroad, glad of a compliment, grateful for 
a dinner, endeavouring sadly to digest all he saw and 
heard. But one was a Patterne; the other a Whitford. 
One had genius; the other pottered after him with the title 
of student. One was the English gentleman wherever he 
went; the other was a new kind of thing, nondescript, 
produced in England of late, and not likely to come to 
much good himself, or do much good to the country. 

Vernon’s dancing in America was capitally described by 
Willoughby. “ Adieu to our cousins! ” the latter wrote on 
his voyage to Japan. “I may possibly have had some 
vogue in their ball-rooms, and in showing them an English 
seat on horseback: I must resign myself if I have not been 
popular among them. I could not sing their national song 


LuETITIA DALE 


25 


— if a congery of States be a nation — and I must confess I 
listened with frigid politeness to their singing of it. A great 
people, no doubt. Adieu to them. I have had to tear old 
Vernon away. He had serious thoughts of settling, means 
to correspond with some of them .’ 5 On the whole, for¬ 
getting two or more “ traits of insolence ” on the part of his 
hosts, which he cited, Willoughby escaped pretty comfort¬ 
ably. The President had beeu, consciously or not, uncivil, 
but one knew his origin! Upon these interjections, pla¬ 
cable flicks of the lionly tail addressed to Britannia the 
Ruler, who expected him in some mildish way to lash 
terga cauda in retiring, Sir Willoughby Patterne passed 
from a land of alien manners; and ever after he spoke of 
America respectfully and pensively, with a tail tucked in, 
as it were. His travels were profitable to himself. The 
fact is, that there are cousins who come to greatness and 
must be pacified, or they will prove annoying. Heaven 
forefend a collision between cousins! 

Willoughby returned to his England after an absence of 
three years. On a fair April morning, the last of the 
month, he drove along his park palings, and by the luck 
of things, Laetitia was the first of his friends whom he met. 
She was crossing from field to field with a band of school- 
children, gathering wild flowers for the morrow May-day. 
He sprang to the ground and seized her hand. “ Laetitia 
Bale! ” he said. He panted. “Your name is sweet Eng¬ 
lish music! And you are well ? ” The anxious question 
permitted him to read deeply in her eyes. He found the 
man he sought there, squeezed him passionately, and let 
her go, saying, “I could not have prayed for a lovelier 
home-scene to welcome me than you and these children 
flower-gathering. I don’t believe in chance. It was 
decreed that we should meet. Do not you think so ? ” 

Laetitia breathed faintly of her gladness. 

He begged her to distribute a gold coin among the little 
ones; asked for the names of some of them, and repeated, 
“ Mary, Susan, Charlotte — only the Christian names, pray! 
Well, my dears, you will bring your garlands to the Hall 
to-morrow morning; and mind, early! no slugabeds to¬ 
morrow ; I suppose I am browned, Laetitia ? ” He smiled in 
apology for the foreign sun, and murmured with rapture: 


26 


THE EGOIST 


“The green of this English country is unsurpassed. It is 
wonderful. Leave England and be baked, if you would 
appreciate it. You can’t, unless you taste exile as I have 
done — for how many years ? How many ? ” 

“Three,” said Laetitia. 

“Thirty!” said he. “It seems to me that length. At 
least, I am immensely older. But looking at you, I could 
think it less than three. You have not changed. You are 
absolutely unchanged. I am bound to hope so. I shall 
see you soon. I have much to talk of, much to tell you. 
I shall hasten to call on your father. I have specially 
to speak with him. I — what happiness this is, Laetitia! 
But I must not forget I have a mother. Adieu; for some 
hours — not for many! ” 

He pressed her hand again. He was gone. 

She dismissed the children to their homes. Plucking 
primroses was hard labour now — a dusty business. She 
could have wished that her planet had not descended to 
earth, his presence agitated her so; but his enthusiastic 
patriotism was like a shower that in the Spring season of 
the year sweeps against the hard-binding East and melts 
the air, and brings out new colours, makes life flow; and 
her thoughts recurred in wonderment to the behaviour of 
Constantia Durham. That was Lsetitia’s manner of taking 
up her weakness once more. She could almost have reviled 
the woman who had given this beneficent magician, this 
pathetic exile, of the aristocratic sunburnt visage and 
deeply-scrutinizing eyes, cause for grief. How deeply his 
eyes could read! The starveling of patience awoke to the 
idea of a feast. The sense of hunger came with it, and 
hope came, and patience fled. She would have rejected 
hope to keep patience nigh her; but surely it cannot 
always be Winter ! said her reasoning blood, and we must 
excuse her as best we can if she was assured by her restored 
Warmth that Willoughby came in the order of the revolv¬ 
ing seasons, marking a long Winter past. He had specially 
to speak with her father, he had said. What could that 
mean? What but —! She dared not phrase it or view it. 

At their next meeting she was “Miss Dale.” 

A week later he was closeted with her father. 

Mr. Dale, in the evening of that pregnant day, eulogized 


LAETITIA DALE 


27 


Sir Willoughby as a landlord. A new lease of the cottage 
was to be granted him on the old terms, he said. Except 
that Sir Willoughby had congratulated him in the posses¬ 
sion of an excellent daughter, their interview was one of 
landlord and tenant, it appeared; and Laetitia said, “So 
we shall not have to leave the cottage ? ” in a tone of satis¬ 
faction, while she quietly gave a wrench to the neck of the 
young hope in her breast. At night her diary received 
the line: “This day I was a fool. To-morrow ?” 

To-morrow and many days after there were dashes instead 
of words. 

Patience travelled back to her sullenly. As we must 
have some kind of food, and she had nothing else, she 
took to that and found it dryer than of yore. It is a com¬ 
posing but a lean dietary. The dead are patient, and we 
get a certain likeness to them in feeding on it unintermit - 
tingly over-long. Her hollowed cheeks with the fallen 
leaf in them pleaded against herself to justify her idol for 
not looking down on one like her. She saw him when he 
was at the Hall. He did not notice any change. He was 
exceedingly gentle and courteous. More than once she 
discovered his eyes dwelling on her, and then he looked 
hurriedly at his mother, and Laetitia had to shut her mind 
from thinking, lest thinking should be a sin and hope a 
guilty spectre. But had his mother objected to her? She 
could not avoid asking herself. His tour of the globe had 
been undertaken at his mother’s desire; she was an ambi¬ 
tious lady, in failing health; and she wished to have him 
living with her at Patterne, yet seemed to agree that he 
did wisely to reside in London. 

One day Sir Willoughby, in the quiet manner which 
was his humour, informed her that he had become a country 
gentleman; he had abandoned London, he loathed it as the 
burial-place of the individual man. He intended to sit 
down on his estates and have his cousin Vernon Whitford 
to assist him in managing them, he said; and very amusing 
was his description of his cousin’s shifts to live by litera¬ 
ture, and add enough to a beggarly income to get his usual 
two months of the year in the Alps. Previous to his great 
tour, Willoughby had spoken of Vernon’s judgement with 
derision; nor was it entirely unknown that Vernon had 


28 


THE EGOIST 


offended his family pride by some extravagant act. But 
after their return he acknowledged Vernon’s talents, and 
seemed unable to do without him. 

The new arrangement gave Lsetitia a companion for her 
walks. Pedestrianism was a sour business to Willoughby, 
whose exclamation of the word indicated a willingness for 
any amount of exercise on horseback; but she had no horse, 
and so, while he hunted, Lsetitia and Vernon walked, and 
the neighbourhood speculated on the circumstances, until 
the ladies Eleanor and Isabel Patterne engaged her more 
frequently for carriage exercise, and Sir Willoughby was 
observed riding beside them. 

A real and sunny pleasure befell Lsetitia, in the estab¬ 
lishment of young Crossjay Patterne under her roof; the 
son of the lieutenant, now captain, of Marines; a boy of 
twelve, with the sprights of twelve boys in him, for whose 
board and lodgement Vernon provided by arrangement 
with her father. Vernon was one of your men that have 
no occupation for their money, no bills to pay for repair of 
their property, and are insane to spend. He had heard of 
Captain Patterned large family, and proposed to have his 
eldest boy at the Hall, to teach him; but Willoughby de¬ 
clined to house the son of such a father, predicting that the 
boy’s hair would be red, his skin eruptive, and his prac¬ 
tices detestable. So Vernon, having obtained Mr. Dale’s 
consent to accommodate this youth, stalked off to Devon- 
port, and brought back a rosy-cheeked, round-bodied rogue 
of a boy, who fel^ipon meats and puddings, and defeated 
them, with a captfljting simplicity in his confession that 
he had never had enough to eat in his life. He had gone 
through a training for a plentiful table. At first, after a 
number of helps, young Crossjay would sit and sigh 
heavily, in contemplation of the unfinished dish. Subse¬ 
quently he told his host and hostess that he had two sisters 
above his own age, and three brothers and two sisters 
younger than he: “ All hungry! ” said the boy. 

His pathos was most comical. It was a good month be¬ 
fore he could see pudding taken away from table without 
a sigh of regret that he could not finish it as deputy for 
the Devonport household. The pranks of the little fellow, 
and his revel in a country life, and muddy wildness in it, 


LiETITIA DALE 


29 


amused Laetitia from morning to night. She, when she 
had caught him, taught him in the morning; Vernon, 
favoured by the chase, in the afternoon. Young Crossjay 
would have enlivened any household. He was not only 
indolent, he was opposed to the acquisition of knowledge 
through the medium of books, and would say: “But 1 
don’t want to! ” in a tone to make a logician thoughtful. 
Nature was very strong in him. He had, on each return 
of the hour for instruction, to be plucked out of the earth, 
rank of the soil, like a root, for the exercise of his big 
round headpiece on those tyrannous puzzles. But the 
habits of birds, and the place for their eggs, and the man¬ 
agement of rabbits, and the tickling of fish, and poaching 
joys with combative boys of the district, and how to 
wheedle a cook for a luncheon for a whole day in the rain, 
he soon knew of his great nature. His passion for our 
naval service was a means of screwing his attention to 
lessons after he had begun to understand that the desert 
had to be traversed to attain midshipman’s rank. He 
boasted ardently of his fighting father, and, chancing to 
be near the Hall as he was talking to Vernon and Laetitia 
of his father, he propounded a question close to his heart; 
and he put it in these words, following: “My father’s the 
one to lead an army! ” when he paused: “ I say, Mr. 
Whitford, Sir Willoughby’s kind to me, and gives me 
crown-pieces, why wouldn’t he see my father, and my 
father came here ten miles in the rain to see him, and had 
to walk ten miles back, and sleep at an inn ? ” 

The only answer to be given was, that Sir Willoughby 
could not have been at home. “ Oh! my father saw him, 
and Sir Willoughby said he was not at home,” the boy 
replied, producing an odd ring in the ear by his repetition 
of “ not at home ” in the same voice as the apology, plainly 
innocent of malice. Vernon told Laetitia, however, that 
the boy never asked an explanation of Sir Willoughby. 

Unlike the horse of the adage, it was easier to compel 
young Crossjay to drink of the waters of instruction than 
to get him to the brink. His heart was not so antagonistic 
as his nature, and by degrees, owing to a proper mixture 
of discipline and cajolery, he imbibed. He was whistling 
at the cook’s windows after a day of wicked truancy, on 


30 


THE EGOIST 


an April night, and reported adventures over the supper 
supplied to him. Lsetitia entered the kitchen with a re¬ 
proving forefinger. He jumped to kiss her, and went on 
chattering of a place fifteen miles distant, where he had 
seen Sir Willoughby riding with a young lady. The 
impossibility that the boy should have got so far on foot 
made Laetitia doubtful of his veracity, until she heard that 
a gentleman had taken him up on the road in a gig, and 
had driven him to a farm to show him strings of birds’ 
eggs and stuffed birds of every English kind, kingfishers, 
yaffles, black woodpeckers, goat-sucker owls, more mouth 
than head, with dusty, dark-spotted wings, like moths; 
all very circumstantial. Still, in spite of his tea at the 
farm, and ride back by rail at the gentleman’s expense, 
the tale seemed fictitious to Lsetitia until Crossjay related 
how that he had stood to salute on the road to the railway, 
and taken off his cap to Sir Willoughby, and Sir Wil¬ 
loughby had passed him, not noticing him, though the 
young lady did, and looked back and nodded. The hue of 
truth was in that picture. 

Strange eclipse, when the hue of truth comes shadowing 
over our bright ideal planet. It will not seem the planet’s 
fault, but truth’s. Reality is the offender; delusion our 
treasure that we are robbed of. Then begins with us the 
term of wilful delusion, and its necessary accompaniment 
of the disgust of reality; exhausting the heart much more 
than patient endurance of starvation. 

Hints were dropping about the neighbourhood; the 
hedgeways twittered, the tree-tops cawed. Mrs. Mount- 
stuart Jenkinson was loud on the subject: “Patterne is to 
have a mistress at last, you say ? But there never was a 
doubt of his marrying — he must marry; and, so long as he 
does not marry a foreign woman, we have no cause to 
complain. He met her at Cherriton. Both were struck 
at the same moment. Her father is, I hear, some sort of 
learned man; money; no land. No house either, I believe. 
People who spend half their time on the Continent. They 
are now for a year at Upton Park. The very girl to settle 
down and entertain when she does think of settling. 
Eighteen, perfect manners; you need not ask if a beauty. 
Sir Willoughby will have his dues. We must teach her to 


LJ3TITIA DALE 


31 


make amends to him — but don’t listen to Lady Busshe ! 
He was too young at twenty-three or twenty-four. No 
young man is ever jilted; he is allowed to escape. A 
young man married is a fire-eater bound over to keep the 
peace; if he keeps it he worries it. At thirty-one or 
thirty-two he is ripe for his command, because he knows 
how to bend. And Sir Willoughby is a splendid creature, 
only wanting a wife to complete him. For a man like 
that to go on running about would never do. Soberly — no! 
It would soon be getting ridiculous. He has been no 
worse than other men, probably better — infinitely more 
excusable; but now we have him, and it was time we 
should. I shall see her and study her, sharply, you may 
be sure; though I fancy I can rely on his judgement.” 

In confirmation of the swelling buzz, the Rev. Dr. Mid¬ 
dleton and his daughter paid a flying visit to the Hall, 
where they were seen only by the members of the Patterne 
family. Young Crossjay had a short conversation with 
Miss Middleton, and ran to the cottage full of her — she 
loved the navy and had a merry face. She had a smile of 
very pleasant humour, according to Vernon. The young 
lady was outlined to Lsetitia as tall, elegant, lively; and 
painted as carrying youth like a flag. With her smile of 
“very pleasant humour,” she could not but be winning. 

Vernon spoke more of her father, a scholar of high 
repute; happily, a scholar of an independent fortune. His 
maturer recollection of Miss Middleton grew poetic, or 
he described her in an image to suit a poetic ear: “She 
gives you an idea of the Mountain Echo. Dr. Middleton 
has one of the grandest heads in England.” 

“ What is her Christian name ? ” said Laetitia. 

He thought her Christian name was Clara. 

Laetitia went to bed and walked through the day con¬ 
ceiving the Mountain Echo, the swift wild spirit, Clara by 
name, sent fleeting on a far half-circle by the voice it is 
roused to subserve; sweeter than beautiful, high above 
drawing-room beauties as the colours of the sky; and if, 
at the same time, elegant and of loveable smiling, could a 
man resist her? To inspire the title of Mountain Echo 
in any mind, a young lady must be singularly spiritualized. 
Her father doated on her, Vernon said. Who would not? 


32 


THE EGOIST 


It seemed an additional cruelty that the grace of a poeti¬ 
cal attractiveness should be round her, for this was rob¬ 
bing Laetitia of some of her own little fortune, mystical 
though that might be. But a man like Sir Willoughby 
had claims on poetry, possessing as he did every manly 
grace; and to think that Miss Middleton had won him by 
virtue of something native to her likewise, though mysti¬ 
cally, touched Laetitia with a faint sense of relationship 
to the chosen girl. “What is in me, he sees on her.” 
It decked her pride to think so, as a wreath on the grave¬ 
stone. She encouraged her imagination to brood over 
Clara, and invested her designedly with romantic charms, 
in spite of pain: the ascetic zealot hugs his share of 
heaven — most bitter, most blessed — in his hair shirt and 
scourge, and Lsetitia’s happiness was to glorify Clara. 
Through that chosen rival, through her comprehension of 
the spirit of Sir Willoughby’s choice of one such as Clara, 
she was linked to him yet. 

Her mood of ecstatic fidelity was a dangerous exaltation: 
one that in a desert will distort the brain, and in the world 
where the idol dwells will put him, should he come nigh, 
to its own furnace-test, and get a clear brain out of a 
burnt heart. She was frequently at the Hall, helping to 
nurse Lady Patterne. Sir Willoughby had hitherto treated 
her as a dear insignificant friend, to whom it was unneces¬ 
sary that he should mention the object of his rides to 
Upton Park. 

He had, however, in the contemplation of what he was 
gaining, fallen into anxiety about what he might be losing. 
She belonged to his brilliant youth; her devotion was the 
bride of his youth; he was a man who lived backwards 
almost as intensely as in the present; and, notwithstanding 
Laetitia’s praiseworthy zeal in attending on his mother, he 
suspected some unfaithfulness: hardly without cause: she 
had not looked paler of late, her eyes had not reproached 
him; the secret of the old days between them had been 
as little concealed as it was exposed. She might have 
buried it, after the way of women, whose bosoms can be 
tombs, if we and the world allow them to be; absolutely 
sepulchres, where you lie dead, ghastly. Even if not dead 
and hoTsrjhle to think of. you may be lying cold, somewhere 


L^ETITIA DALE 


33 


in a corner. Even if embalmed, you may not be much 
visited. And how is the world to know you are embalmed ? 
You are no better than a rotting wretch to the world that 
does not have peeps of you in the woman’s breast, and see 
lights burning and an occasional exhibition of the services 
of worship. There are women — tell us not of her of 
Ephesus ! — that have embalmed you, and have quitted the 
world to keep the tapers alight, and a stranger comes, and 
they, who have your image before them, will suddenly 
blow out the vestal flames and treat you as dust to fatten 
the garden of their bosoms for a fresh flower of love. Sir 
Willoughby knew it; he had experience of it in the form 
of the stranger; and he knew the stranger’s feelings 
toward his predecessor and the lady. 

He waylaid Laetitia to talk of himself and his plans: the 
project of a run to Italy. Enviable ? Yes, but in England 
you live the higher moral life. Italy boasts of sensual 
beauty; the spiritual is yours. “I know Italy well; I 
have often wished to act as cicerone to you there. As 
it is, I suppose I shall be with those who know the land 
as well as I do, and will not be particularly enthusiastic: 
... if you are what you were ? ” He was guilty of this 
perplexing twist from one person to another in a sentence 
more than once. While he talked exclusively of himself, 
it seemed to her a condescension. In time he talked prin¬ 
cipally of her, beginning with her admirable care of his 
mother; and he wished to introduce “a Miss Middleton” 
to her; he wanted her opinion of Miss Middleton; he 
relied on her intuition of character, had never known it 
err. 

“If I supposed it could err, Miss Dale, I should not be 
so certain of myself. I am bound up in my good opinion 
of you, you see; and you must continue the same, or where 
shall 1 be ? ” Thus he was led to dwell upon friendship, 
and the charm of the friendship of men and women, “ Pla¬ 
tonism,” as it was called. “I have laughed at it in the 
world, but not in the depth of my heart. The world’s 
platonic attachments are laughable enough. You have 
taught me that the ideal of friendship is possible — when 
we find two who are capable of a disinterested esteem. 
The rest of life is duty; duty to parents, duty to country, 


34 


THE EGOIST 


But friendship is the holiday of those who can be friends. 
Wives are plentiful, friends are rare. I know how rare!” 

Lsetitia swallowed her thoughts as they sprang up. 
Why was he torturing her ? — to give himself a holiday ? 
She could bear to lose him — she was used to it — and bear 
his indifference, but not that he should disfigure himself; 
it made her poor. It was as if he required an oath of her 
when he said: “ Italy! But I shall never see a day in 
Italy to compare with the day of my return to England, 
or know a pleasure so exquisite as your welcome of me! 
Will you be true to that? May I look forward to just 
another such meeting?” 

He pressed her for an answer. She gave the best she 
could. He was dissatisfied, and to her hearing it was 
hardly in the tone of manliness that he entreated her to 
reassure him; he womanized his language. She had to say: 
“I am afraid I cannot undertake to make it an appoint¬ 
ment, Sir Willoughby,” before he recovered his alertness, 
which he did, for he was anything but obtuse, with the 
reply, “You would keep it if you promised, and freeze at 
your post. So, as accidents happen, we must leave it to 
fate. The will’s the thing. You know my detestation of 
changes. At least I have you for my tenant, and wher¬ 
ever I am, I see your light at the end of my park.” 

“Neither my father nor I would willingly quit Ivy 
Cottage,” said Lsetitia. 

“So far, then,” he murmured. “You will give me a 
long notice, and it must be with my consent if you think 
of quitting?” 

“I could almost engage to do that,” she said. 

“ You love the place ? ” 

“Yes; I am the most contented of cottagers.” 

“ I believe, Miss Dale, it would be well for my happi¬ 
ness were I a cottager.” 

“ That is the dream of the palace. But to be one, and 
not to wish to be other, is quiet sleep in comparison.” 

“ You paint a cottage in colours that tempt one to run 
from big houses and households.” 

“You would run back to them faster, Sir Willoughby.” 

“You may know me,” said he, bowing and passing on 
contentedly. He stopped: *But I am not ambitious.” 


LiETITIA DALE 


35 


“Perhaps you are too proud for ambition, Sir Wil¬ 
loughby.” 

“ You bit me to the life! ” 

He passed on regretfully. Clara Middleton did not study 
and know him like Lsetitia Dale. 

Lsetitia was left to think it pleased him to play at cat 
and mouse. She had not “hit him to the life,” or she 
would have marvelled in acknowledging how sincere he 
was. 

At her next sitting by the bedside of Lady Patterne, she 
received a certain measure of insight that might have helped 
her to fathom him, if only she could have kept her feel¬ 
ings down. The old lady was affectionately confidential in 
talking of her one subject, her son. “ And here is another 
dashing girl, my dear; she has money and health and 
beauty; and so has he; and it appears a fortunate union; 
I hope and pray it may be; but we begin to read the world 
when our eyes grow dim, because we read the plain lines, 
and I ask myself whether money and health and beauty on 
both sides, have not been the mutual attraction. We tried 
it before; and that girl Durham was honest, whatever we 
may call her. I should have desired an appreciative, 
thoughtful partner for him, a woman of mind, with 
another sort of wealth and beauty. She was honest, she 
ran away in time; there was a worse thing possible than 
that. And now we have the same chapter, and the same 
kind of person, who may not be quite as honest; and I 
shall not see the end of it. Promise me you will always 
De good to him; be my son’s friend; his Egeria, he names 
you. Be what you were to him when that girl broke his 
heart, and no one, not even his mother, was allowed to see 
that he suffered anything. Comfort him in his sensitive¬ 
ness. Willoughby has the most entire faith in you. 
Were that destroyed — I shudder! You are, he says, and 
he has often said, his image of the constant woman. . . .” 

Laetitia’s hearing took in no more. She repeated to 
herself for days: “ His image of the constant woman! ” 
Now, when he was a second time forsaking her, his praise 
of her constancy wore the painful ludicrousness of the look 
of a whimper on the face. 


36 


THE EGOIST 


CHAPTER V 

CLARA MIDDLETON 

The great meeting of Sir Willoughby Patterne and Miss 
Middleton had taken place at Cherriton Grange, the seat 
of a county grandee, where this young lady of eighteen 
was first seen rising above the horizon. She had money 
and health and beauty, the triune of perfect starriness, 
which makes all men astronomers. He looked on her, 
expecting her to look at him. But as soon as he looked 
he found that he must be in motion to win a look in return. 
He was one of a pack; many were ahead of him, the whole 
of them were eager. He had to debate within himself 
how best to communicate to her that he was Willoughby 
Patterne, before her gloves were too much soiled to flatter 
his niceness, for here and there, all around, she was 
yielding her hand to partners — obscurant males whose 
touch leaves a stain. Far too generally gracious was Her 
Starriness to please him. The effect of it, nevertheless, 
was to hurry him with all his might into the heat of the 
jhase, while yet he knew no more of her than that he was 
competing for a prize and Willoughby Patterne only one 
jf dozens to the young lady. 

A deeper student of Science than his rivals, he appreci¬ 
ated Nature’s compliment in the fair one’s choice of you. 
We now scientifically know that in this department of the 
universal struggle, success is awarded to the bettermost. 
You spread a handsomer tail than your fellows, you dress 
a finer top-knot, you pipe a newer note, have a longer 
stride; she reviews you in competition, and selects you. 
The superlative is magnetic to her. She may be looking 
elsewhere, and you will see — the superlative will simply 
have to beckon, away she glides. She cannot help herself; 
it is her nature, and her nature is the guarantee for the 
noblest race of men to come of her. In complimenting 
you, she is a promise of superior offspring. Science thus 
— or it is better to say, an acquaintance with science 
facilitates the cultivation of aristocracy. Consequently 


CLARA MIDDLETON 


87 


a successful pursuit and a wresting of her from a body of 
competitors, tells you that you are the best man. What 
is more, it tells the world so. 

Willoughby aired his amiable superlatives in the eye of 
Miss Middleton; he had a leg. He was the heir of suc¬ 
cessful competitors. He had a style, a tone, an artist 
tailor, an authority of manner: he had in the hopeful 
ardour of the chase among a multitude a freshness that 
gave him advantage; and together with his undeviating 
energy when there was a prize to be won and possessed, 
these were scarcely resistible. He spared no pains, for he 
was adust and athirst for the winning-post. He courted 
her father, aware that men likewise, and parents pre¬ 
eminently, have their preference for the larger offer, the 
deeper pocket, the broader lands, the respectfuller consid¬ 
eration. Men, after their fashion, as well as women, 
distinguish the bettermost, and aid him to succeed, as Dr. 
Middleton certainly did in the crisis of the memorable 
question proposed to his daughter within a month of Wil¬ 
loughby’s reception at Upton Park. The young lady was 
astonished at his whirlwind wooing of her, and bent to it 
like a sapling. She begged for time; Willoughby could 
barely wait. She unhesitatingly owned that she liked no 
one better, and he consented. A calm examination of his 
position told him that it was unfair so long as he stood 
engaged and she did not. She pleaded a desire to see a 
little of the world before she plighted herself. She 
alarmed him; he assumed the amazing God of Love under 
the subtlest guise of the divinity. Willingly would he 
obey her behests, resignedly languish, were it not for his 
mother’s desire to see the future lady of Patterne estab¬ 
lished there before she died. Love shone cunningly 
through the mask of filial duty, but the plea of urgency 
was reasonable. Dr. Middleton thought it reasonable, 
supposing his daughter to have an inclination. She had 
no disinclination, though she had a maidenly desire to see 
a little of the world — grace for one year, she said. Wil¬ 
loughby reduced the year to six months, and granted that 
term, for which, in gratitude, she submitted to stand en¬ 
gaged ; and that was no light whispering of a word. She 
was implored to enter the state of captivity by the pro- 


38 


THE EGOIST 


nunciation of vows — a private but a binding ceremonial. 
She had health and beauty, and money to gild these gifts: 
not that he stipulated for money with his bride, but it 
adds a lustre to dazzle the world; and, moreover, the pack 
of rival pursuers hung close behind, yelping and raising 
their dolorous throats to the moon. Captive she must be. 

He made her engagement no light whispering matter. 
It was a solemn plighting of a troth. Why not ? Having 
said, I am yours, she could say, I am wholly yours, I am 
yours for ever, I swear it, I will never swerve from it, I 
am your wife in heart, yours utterly; our engagement is 
written above. To this she considerately appended, “as 
far as I am concerned;” a piece of somewhat chilling 
generosity, and he forced her to pass him through love's 
catechism in turn, and came out with fervent answers that 
bound him to her too indissolubly to let her doubt of her 
being loved. And I am loved! she exclaimed to her 
heart’s echoes, in simple faith and wonderment. Hardly 
had she begun to think of love ere the apparition arose in 
her path. She had not thought of love with any warmth, 
and here it was. She had only dreamed of love as one of 
the distant blessings of the mighty world, lying some¬ 
where in the world’s forests, across wild seas, veiled, 
encompassed with beautiful perils, a throbbing secresy, 
but too remote to quicken her bosom’s throbs. Her chief 
idea of it was, the enrichment of the world by love. 

Thus did Miss Middleton acquiesce in the principle of 
selection. 

And then did the best man of a host blow his triumphant 
horn, and loudly. 

He looked the fittest; he justified the dictum of Science. 
The survival of the Patternes was assured. “I would,” 
he said to his admirer, Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, 
“have bargained for health above everything, but she has 
everything besides — lineage, beauty, breeding: is what 
they call an heiress, and is the most accomplished of her 
sex.” With a delicate art he conveyed to the lady’s 
understanding that Miss Middleton had been snatched 
from a crowd, without a breath of the crowd having 
offended his niceness. He did it through sarcasm at your 
modern young women, who run about the world nibbling 


CLARA MIDDLETON 


39 


and nibbled at, 


other 

than 


until they know one sex as well as the 


i and are rot a whit less cognizant of the market 
men; pure, possibly; it is not so easy to say inno- 
Cent L-i ecidedly our feminine ideal. Miss Middleton 
was different: she was the true ideal, fresh-gathered morn- 
mgfmit in a basket, warranted by her bloom. 

Women do not defend their younger sisters for doing 
what they perhaps have done — lifting a veil to be seen, 
and peeping at a world where innocence is as poor a guar¬ 
antee as a babe V caul against shipwreck. Women of the 
world never think of attacking the sensual stipulation for 
perfect blooiri, silver purity, which is redolent of the 
Oriental origin of the love-passion of their lords. Mrs. 
Mountstue^rt congratulated Sir Willoughby on the prize he 
had won r j n the fair western-eastern. 

“Leh; me se e her,” she said; and Miss Middleton was 
introduced and critically observed. 

Sh e had the mouth that smiles in repose. The lips met 
full^bn the centre of the bow and thinned along to a lift- 
1D *g dimple; the eyelids also lifted slightly at the outer 
£ Corners and seemed, like the lip into the limpid cheek, 
quickening up the temples, as with a run of light, or the 
ascension indicated off a shoot of colour. Her features 
were playfellows of one another, none of them pretending 
to rigid correctness, nor the nose to the ordinary dignity 
of governess among merry girls, despite which the nose 
was of a fair Resign, not acutely interrogative or inviting 
to gambols. /Aspens imaged in water, waiting for the 
breeze, would offer a susceptible lover some suggestion of 
her face: a pure smooth-white face, tenderly flushed in 
the cheeks, where the gentle dints were faintly intermelt- 
ing even during quietness. I Her eyes were brown, set well 
between mild lids, often shadowed, not unwakeful. Her 
hair of lighter brown, swelling above her temples on the 
sweep to the knot, imposed the triangle of the fabulous 
wild woodland visage from brow to mouth and chin, evi¬ 
dently in agreement with her taste; and the triangle suited 
her; but her face was not significant of a tameless wild¬ 
ness or of weakness; her equable shut mouth threw its 
long curve to guard the small round chin from that effect; 
her eyes wavered only in humour, they were steady when 



40 


THE EGOIST 


thoughtfulness was awakened; and at such seasons the 
build of her winter-beechwood hair io*t the touch of 
nymph-like and whimsical, and strangely, by mere out¬ 
line, added to her appearance of studioas concentration. 
Observe the hawk on stretched wings ever the prey he 
spies, for an idea of this change in the look of a young 
lady whom Vernon Whitford could liken to the Mountain 
Echo, and Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson pronounced to be 
“a dainty rogue in porcelain.” 

Vernon’s fancy of her must have-sprung from her 
prompt and most musical responsiveness. He preferred 
the society of her learned father to that of s a girl under 
twenty engaged to his cousin, but the charm ber ready 
tongue and her voice was to his intelligent understanding 
wit, natural wit, crystal wit, as opposed to th\ e paste- 
sparkle of the wit of the town. In his encomium^\he did 
not quote Miss Middleton’s wit; nevertheless he veiV^red 
to speak of it to Mrs. Mountstuart, causing that laity 
say: ‘‘Ah, well, I have not noticed the wit. You \ ma y 
have the art of drawing it out.” ' . 

No one had noticed the wit. The corrupted hearing o.* 
people required a collision of sounds, Vernon supposed. 
For his part, to prove their excellence, he recollected a 
great many of Miss Middleton’s remarks; they came fly¬ 
ing to him; and as long as he forbore to speak them aloud, 
they had a curious wealth of meaning. It could not be all 
her manner, however much his own manner might spoil 
them. It might be, to a certain degree, her quickness at 
catching the hue and shade of evanescent conversation. 
Possibly by remembering the whole of a conversation 
wherein she had her place, the wit was to be tested; only 
how could any one retain the heavy portion? As there 
was no use in being argumentative on a subject affording 
him personally, and apparently solitarily, refreshment and 
enjoyment, Vernon resolved to keep it to himself. The 
eulogies of her beauty, a possession in which he did not 
consider her so very conspicuous, irritated him in conse¬ 
quence. To flatter Sir Willoughby, it was the fashion to 
exalt her as one of the types of beauty: the one providen¬ 
tially selected to set off his masculine type. She was 
compared to those delicate flowers, the ladies of the Court 



CLARA MIDDLETON 


41 


of China, on rice-paper. A little French dressing would 
make her at home on the sward by the fountain among the 
lutes and whisperers of the bewitching silken shepherd¬ 
esses, who live though they never were. Lady Busshe 
was reminded of the favourite lineaments of the women of 
Leonardo, the angels of Luini. Lady Culmer had seen 
crayon sketches of demoiselles of the French aristocracy 
resembling her. Some one mentioned an antique statue 
of a figure breathing into a flute: and the mouth at the 
flute-stop might have a distant semblance of the bend of 
her mouth, but this comparison was repelled as grotesque. 

For once Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson was unsuccess¬ 
ful. Her “ dainty rogue in porcelain” displeased Sir Wil¬ 
loughby. “Why rogue?” he said. The lady’s fame for 
hitting the mark fretted him, and the grace of his bride’s 
fine bearing stood to support him in his objection. Clara 
was young, healthy, handsome; she was therefore fitted 
to be his wife, the mother of his children, his companion 
picture. Certainly they looked well side by side. In 
walking with her, in drooping to her, the whole man was 
made conscious of the female image of himself by her 
exquisite unlikeness. She completed him, added the softer 
lines wanting to his portrait before the world. He had 
wooed her rageingly; he courted her becomingly; with the 
manly self-possession enlivened by watchful tact which is 
pleasing to girls. He never seemed to undervalue himself 
in valuing her: a secret priceless in the courtship of young 
women that have heads; the lover doubles their sense of 
personal worth through not forfeiting his own. Those 
were proud and happy days when he rode Black Norman 
over to Upton Park, and his lady looked forth for him 
and knew him coming by the faster beating of her heart. 

Her mind, too, was receptive. She took impressions of 
his characteristics, and supplied him a feast. She remem¬ 
bered his chance phrases; noted his ways, his peculiarities, 
as no one of her sex had done. He thanked his cousin 
Vernon for saying she had wit. She had it, and of so 
high a flavour that the more he thought of the epigram 
launched at her, the more he grew displeased. With the 
wit to understand him, and the heart to worship, she had 
a dignity rarely seen in young ladies. 


42 


THE EGOIST 


« Why rogue ? ” he insisted with Mrs. Mountstuart, 

“I said — in porcelain,” she replied. 

“Rogue perplexes me.” 

“Porcelain explains it.” 

“She has the keenest sense of honour.” 

“I am sure she is a paragon of rectitude.” 

“She has a beautiful bearing.” 

“ The carriage of a young princess! ” 

“I find her perfect.” ^ 

“And still she may be a dainty rogue in porcelain.” 

“ Are you judging by the mind or the person, ma’am ? " 

“Both.” 

“ And which is which ? ” 

“There’s no distinction.” 

“ Rogue and mistress of Patterne do not go together.” 

“Why not? She will be a novelty to our neighbour¬ 
hood and an animation of the Hall.” 

“ To be frank, rogue does not rightly match with me.” 

“Take her for a supplement.” 

“You like her?” 

“ In love with her! I can imagine life-long amusement 
in her company. Attend to my advice: prize the porce¬ 
lain and play with the rogue.” 

Sir Willoughby nodded unilluminated. There was 
nothing of rogue in himself, so there could be nothing 
of it in his bride. Elfishness, tricksiness, freakishness, 
were antipathetic to his nature; and he argued that it was 
impossible he should have chosen for his complement a 
person deserving the title. It would not have been sanc¬ 
tioned by his guardian genius. His closer acquaintance 
with Miss Middleton squared with his first impressions; 
you know that this is convincing; the common jury justi¬ 
fies the presentation of the case to them by the grand jury; 
and his original conclusion, that she was essentially fem¬ 
inine, in other words, a parasite and a chalice, Clara’s con¬ 
duct confirmed from day to day. He began to instruct 
her in the knowledge of himself without reserve, and she, 
as she grew less timid with him, became more reflective. 

“I judge by character,” he said to Mrs. Mountstuart. 

“If you have caught the character of a girl,” said she. 

“I think I am not far off it.” 


CLARA MIDDLETON 43 

“ So it was thought by the man who dived for the moon 
in a well.” 

“ How women despise their sex! ” 

“Not a bit. She has no character yet. You are form¬ 
ing it, and pray be advised and be merry; the solid is your 
safest guide; physiognomy and manners will give you 
more of a girl’s character than all the divings you can do. 
She is a charming young woman, only she is one of that 
sort.” 

“Of what sort?” Sir Willoughby asked impatiently. 

“Rogues in porcelain.” 

“ I am persuaded I shall never comprehend it I ” 

“I cannot help you one bit further.” 

“ The word rogue! ” 

“It was dainty rogue.” 

“ Brittle, would you say ? ” 

“I am quite unable to say.” 

“An innocent naughtiness?” 

“Prettily moulded in a delicate substance.” 

“You are thinking of some piece of Dresden you sup¬ 
pose her to resemble.” 

“I dare say.” 

“Artificial?” 

“You would not have her natural ?” 

“ I am heartily satisfied with her from head to foot, my 
dear Mrs. Mountstuart.” 

“Nothing could be better. And sometimes she will 
lead, and generally you will lead, and everything will go 
well, my dear Sir Willoughby.” 

Like all rapid phrasers, Mrs. Mountstuart detested the 
analysis of her sentence. It had an outline in vagueness, 
and was flung out to be apprehended, not dissected. Her 
directions for the reading of Miss Middleton’s character 
were the same that she practised in reading Sir Wil¬ 
loughby’s, whose physiognomy and manners bespoke him 
what she presumed him to be, a splendidly proud gentle¬ 
man, with good reason. 

Mrs. Mountstuart’s advice was wiser than her procedure, 
for she stopped short where he declined to begin. He 
dived below the surface without studying that index-page. 
He had won Miss Middleton’s hand; he believed he had 


44 


THE EGOIST 


captured her heart; hut he was not so certain of his pos¬ 
session of her soul, and he went after it. Our enamoured 
gentleman had therefore no tally of Nature’s writing above 
to set beside his discoveries in the deeps. Now it is a 
dangerous accompaniment of this habit of diving, that 
where we do not light on the discoveries we anticipate, we 
fall to work sowing and planting; which becomes a dis¬ 
turbance of the gentle bosom. Miss Middleton’s features 
were legible as to the mainspring of her character. He 
could have seen that she had a spirit with a natural love 
of liberty, and required the next thing to liberty, spacious¬ 
ness, if she was to own allegiance. Those features, un¬ 
happily, instead of serving for an introduction to the 
within, were treated as the mirror of himself. They 
were indeed of an amiable sweetness to tempt an accepted 
lover to angle for the first person in the second. But he 
had made the discovery that their minds differed on one 
or two points, and a difference of view in his bride was 
obnoxious to his repose. He struck at it recurringly to 
show her error under various aspects. He desired to 
shape her character to the feminine of his own, and be¬ 
trayed the surprise of a slight disappointment at her advo¬ 
cacy of her ideas. She said immediately: “ It is not too 
late, Willoughby,” and wounded him, for he wanted her 
simply to be material in his hands for him to mould her; 
he had no other thought. He lectured her on the theme 
of the infinity of love. How was it not too late ? They 
were plighted; they were one eternally; they could not 
be parted. She listened gravely, conceiving the infinity 
as a narrow dwelling where a voice droned and ceased not. 
However, she listened.' She became an attentive listener. 


HIS COURTSHIP 


45 


CHAPTER VI 

HIS COURTSHIP 

The world was the principal topic of dissension between 
these lovers. His opinion of the world affected her like 
a creature threatened with a deprivation of air. He ex¬ 
plained to his darling that lovers of necessity do loathe the 
world. They live in the world, they accept its benefits, 
and assist it as well as they can. In their hearts they 
must despise it, shut it out, that their love for one another 
may pour in a clear channel, and with all the force they 
have. They cannot enjoy the sense of security for their 
love unless they fence away the world. It is, you will 
allow, gross; it is a beast. Formally we thank it for the 
good we get of it; only we two have an inner temple 
where the worship we conduct is actually, if you would 
but see it, an excommunication of the world. We abhor 
that beast to adore that divinity. This gives us our one¬ 
ness, our isolation, our happiness. This is to love with 
the soul. Do you see, darling ? 

She shook her head; she could not see it. She would 
admit none of the notorious errors of the world; its back¬ 
biting, selfishness, coarseness, intrusiveness, infectious¬ 
ness. She was young. She might, Willoughby thought, 
have let herself be led: she was not docile. She must be 
up in arms as a champion of the world: and one saw she 
was hugging her dream of a romantic world, nothing else. 
She spoilt the secret bower-song he delighted to tell over 
to her. And how, Powers of Love! is love-making to be 
pursued if we may not kick the world out of our bower 
and wash our hands of it? Love that does not spurn the 
world when lovers curtain themselves is a love — is it not 
so ? — that seems to the unwhipped scoffing world to go 
slinking into basiation’s obscurity, instead of on a glorious 
march behind the screen. Our hero had a strong senti¬ 
ment as to the policy of scorning the world for the sake of 
defending his personal pride and (to his honour, be it said) 
his lady’s delicacy. 


46 


THE EGOIST 


The act of scorning put them both above the world, said, 
retro Sathanas ! So much, as a piece of tactics: he was 
highly civilized: in the second instance, he knew it to be 
the world which must furnish the dry sticks for the bon¬ 
fire of a woman’s worship. He knew, too, that he was 
prescribing poetry to his betrothed, practicable poetry. 
She had a liking for poetry, and sometimes quoted the 
stuff in defiance of his pursed mouth and pained murmur: 
“I am no poet; ” but his poetry of the enclosed and for¬ 
tified bower, without nonsensical rhymes to catch the ears 
of women, appeared incomprehensible to her, if not adverse. 
She would not burn the world for him; she would not, 
though a purer poetry is little imaginable, reduce herself 
to ashes, or incense, or essence, in honour of him, and so, 
by love’s transmutation, literally be the man she was to 
marry. She preferred to be herself, with the egoism of 
women ! She said it: she said: “ I must be myself to be 
of any value to you, Willoughby.” He was indefatigable 
in his lectures on the aesthetics of love. Frequently, for 
an indemnification to her (he had no desire that she should 
be a loser by ceasing to admire the world), he dwelt on 
his own youthful ideas; and his original fancies about the 
world were presented to her as a substitute for the theme. 

Miss Middleton bore it well, for she was sure that he 
meant well. Bearing so well what was distasteful to her, 
she became less well able to bear what she had merely noted 
in observation before: his view of scholarship; his manner 
toward Mr. Vernon Whitford, of whom her father spoke 
warmly; the rumour concerning his treatment of a Miss 
Dale. And the country tale of Constantia Durham sang 
itself to her in a new key. He had no contempt for the 
world’s praises. Mr. Whitford wrote the letters to the 
county paper which gained him applause at various great 
houses, and he accepted it, and betrayed a tingling fright 
lest he should be the victim of a sneer of the world he 
contemned. Kecollecting his remarks, her mind was 
afflicted by the “something illogical” in him that we read¬ 
ily discover when our natures are no longer running free, 
and then at once we yearn for a disputation. She resolved 
that she would one day, one distant day, provoke it — 
upon what ? The special point eluded her. The world is 


HIS COURTSHIP 


47 


too huge a client, and too pervious, too spotty, for a girl 
to defend against a man. That “something illogical” had 
stirred her feelings more than her intellect to revolt. She 
could not constitute herself the advocate of Mr. Whitford. 
Still she marked the disputation for an event to come. 

Meditating on it, she fell to picturing Sir Willoughby’s 
face at the first accents of his bride’s decided disagreement 
with him. The picture once conjured up would not be 
laid. He was handsome; so correctly handsome, that a 
slight unfriendly touch precipitated him into caricature. 
His habitual air of happy pride, of indignant contentment 
rather, could easily be overdone. Surprise, when he threw 
emphasis on it, stretched him with the tall eyebrows of a 
mask — limitless under the spell of caricature; and in time, 
whenever she was not pleased by her thoughts, she had 
that, and not his likeness, for the vision of him. And it 
was unjust, contrary to her deeper feelings; she rebuked 
herself, and as much as her naughty spirit permitted, she 
tried to look on him as the world did; an effort inducing 
reflections upon the blessings of ignorance. She seemed 
to herself beset by a circle of imps, hardly responsible for 
her thoughts. 

He outshone Mr. Whitford in his behaviour to young 
Crossjay. She had seen him with the boy, and he was 
amused, indulgent, almost frolicsome, in contradistinction 
to Mr. Whitford’s tutorly sharpness. He had the English 
father’s tone of a liberal allowance for boy’s tastes and 
pranks, and he ministered to the partiality of the genus for 
pocket-money. He did not play the schoolmaster, like 
bookworms who get poor little lads in their grasp. 

Mr. Whitford avoided her very much. He came to 
Upton Park on a visit to her father, and she was not 
particularly sorry that she saw him only at table. He 
treated her by fits to a level scrutiny of deep-set eyes un¬ 
pleasantly penetrating. She had liked his eyes. They 
became unbearable; they dwelt in the memory as if they 
had left a phosphorescent line. She had been taken by 
playmate boys in her infancy to peep into hedge-leaves, 
where the mother-bird brooded on the nest; and the eyes of 
the bird in that marvellous dark thickset home, had sent 
her away with worlds of fancy. Mr. Whitford’s gaze 


48 


THE EGOIST 


revived her susceptibility, but not the old happy wondering. 
She was glad of his absence, after a certain hour that she 
passed with Willoughby, a wretched hour to remember. 
Mr. Whitford had left, and Willoughby came, bringing bad 
news of his mother’s health. Lady Patterne was fast fail¬ 
ing. Her son spoke of the loss she would be to him; he 
spoke of the dreadfulness of death. He alluded to his own 
death to come, carelessly, with a philosophical air. 

“ All of us must go! our time is short.” 

“Very,” she assented. 

It sounded like want of feeling. 

“ If you lose me, Clara! ” 

“ But you are strong, Willoughby.” 
u I may be cut off to-morrow.” 

11 Do not talk in such a manner.” 

“ It is as well that it should be faced.” 

“ I cannot see what purpose it serves.” 

“ Should you lose me, my love ! ” 

“ Willoughby! ” 

“ Oh, the bitter pang of leaving you! ” 

“ Dear Willoughby, you are distressed ; your mother may 
recover; let us hope she will; I will help to nurse her; ] 
have offered, you know; I am ready, most anxious. 1 
believe I am a good nurse.” 

“ It is this belief — that one does not die with death l ” 
“That is our comfort.” 

“ When we love ?” 

“ Does it not promise that we meet again ? ” 

“To walk the world and see you perhaps . . . with 
another! ” 

“ See me ? — Where ? Here ? ” 

“ Wedded ... to another. You ! my bride ; whom I 
call mine ; and you are ! You would be still — in that hor¬ 
ror ! But all things are possible ; women are women; they 
swim in infidelity, from wave to wave! I know them.” 

“ Willoughby, do not torment yourself and me, I beg 
you.” 

He meditated profoundly, and asked her : “ Could you be 
such a saint among women ? ” 

“ I think I am a more than usually childish girl.” 

“ Not to forget me ? ” 


HIS COURTSHIP 


49 


“ Oh! no.” 

“ Still to be mine ? 99 

“ I am yours.” 

“ To plight yourself ? ” 

“ It is done.” 

“ Be mine beyond death ? 99 

“ Married is married, I think.” 

“ Clara! to dedicate your life to our love ! Never one 
touch! not one whisper ! not a thought, not a dream ! Could 
you ? — it agonizes me to imagine ... be inviolate ? mine 
above ? — mine before all men, though I am gone: — true to 
my dust ? Tell me. Give me that assurance. True to my 
name ! —Oh ! I hear them. ‘His relict/ Buzzings about 
Lady Patterne. ‘ The widow/ If you knew their talk of 
widows! Shut your ears, my angel! But if she holds them 
off and keeps her path, they are forced to respect her. The 
dead husband is not the dishonoured wretch they fancied 
him, because he was out of their way. He lives in the heart 
of his wife. Clara ! my Clara! as I live in yours, whether 
here or away; whether you are a wife or widow, there is no 
distinction for love — I am your husband — say it — eter¬ 
nally. I must have peace; I cannot endure the pain. 
Depressed, yes ; I have cause to be. But it has haunted me 
ever since we joined hands. To have you — to lose you ! 99 

“ Is it not possible that I may be the first to die ? ” said 
Miss Middleton. 

" And lose you, with the thought that you, lovely as you 
are, and the dogs of the world barking round you, might . . . 
Is it any wonder that I have my feeling for the world ? 
This hand! — the thought is horrible. You would be sur¬ 
rounded ; men are brutes; the scent of unfaithfulness ex¬ 
cites them, overjoys them. And I helpless ! The thought 
is maddening. I see a ring of monkeys grinning. There is 
your beauty, and man’s delight in desecrating. You would 
be worried night and day to quit my name, to ... I feel 
the blow now. You would have no rest for them, nothing 
to cling to without your oath.” 

“An oath ! ” said Miss Middleton. 

“ It is no delusion, my love, when I tell you that with this 
thought upon me I see a ring of monkey-faces grinning at 
me: they haunt me. But you do swear it! Once, and I 


50 


THE EGOIST 


will never trouble you on the subject again. My weakness! 
if you like. You will learn that it is love, a man’s love, 
stronger than death.” 

“ An oath ? ” she said, and moved her lips to recall what 
she might have said and forgotten. “ To what ? what 
oath ? ” 

“ That you will be true to me dead as well as living ! 
Whisper it.” 

“ Willoughby, I shall be true to my vows at the 
altar.” 

“ To me! me! ” 

“ It will be to you.” 

“ To my soul. No heaven can be for me — I see none, 
only torture, unless I have your word, Clara. I trust it. I 
will trust it implicitly. My confidence in you is absolute.” 

“ Then you need not be troubled.” 

“ It is for you , my love; that you may be armed and 
strong when I am not by to protect you.” 

“ Our views of the world are opposed, Willoughby.” 

“ Consent; gratify me ; swear it. Say, ‘ Beyond death.* 
Whisper it. I ask for nothing more. Women think the 
husband’s grave breaks the bond, cuts the tie, sets them 
loose. They wed the flesh — pah! What I call on you for 
is nobility: the transcendant nobility of faithfulness beyond 
death. 1 His widow! ’ let them say; a saint in widowhood.” 

“ My vows at the altar must suffice.” 

“ You will not ? Clara ! ” 

“ I am plighted to you.” 

“ Not a word ? — a simple promise ? But you love me ? h 

“ I have given you the best proof of it that I can.” 

“ Consider how utterly I place confidence in you.” 

“ I hope it is well placed.” 

“ I could kneel to you, to worship you, if you would, 
Clara!” 

“ Kneel to heaven, not to me, Willoughby. I am • . . 
I wish I were able to tell what I am. I may be inconstant: 
I do not know myself. Think ; question yourself whether I 
am really the person you should marry. Your wife should 
have great qualities of mind and soul. I will consent to 
hear that I do not possess them, and abide by the verdict.” 

“ You do j you do possess them ! ” Willoughby cried. 


HIS COURTSHIP 


51 


“ When you know better what the world is, you will under, 
stand my anxiety. Alive, I am strong to shield you from it; 
dead, helpless—that is all. You would be clad in mail, 
steel-proof, inviolable, if you would . . . But try to enter 
into my mind; think with me, feel with me. When you 
have once comprehended the intensity of the love of a man 
like me, you will not require asking. It is the difference of 
the elect and the vulgar; of the ideal of love from the 
coupling of the herds. We will let it drop. At least, I 
have your hand. As long as I live I have your hand. Ought 
I not to be satisfied ? I am ; only, I see farther than most 
men, and feel more deeply. And now I must ride to my 
mother’s bedside. She dies Lady Patterne! It might have 
been that she . . . but she is a woman of women! With 
a father-in-law ! Just heaven! Could I have stood by her 
then with the same feelings of reverence ? A very little, 
my love, and everything gained for us by civilization crum¬ 
bles ; we fall back to the first mortar-bowl we were bruised 
and stirred in. My thoughts, when I take my stand to 
watch by her, come to this conclusion, that, especially in 
women, distinction is the thing to be aimed at. Otherwise 
we are a weltering human mass. Women must teach us to > 
venerate them, or we may as well be bleating and barking J 
and bellowing. So, now enough. You have but to think a 
little. I must be off. It may have happened during 
my absence. I will write. I shall hear from you ? Come 
and see me mount Black Norman. My respects to your 
father. I have no time to pay them in person. One! ” 

He took the one — love’s mystical number — from which 
commonly spring multitudes ; but, on the present occasion, 
it was a single one, and cold. She watched him riding away 
on his gallant horse as handsome a cavalier as the world 
could show, and the contrast of his recent language and his 
fine figure was a riddle that froze her blood. Speech so 
foreign to her ears, unnatural in tone, unmanlike even for a 
lover (who is allowed a softer dialect), set her vainly sound¬ 
ing for the source and drift of it. She was glad of not 
having to encounter eyes like Mr. Vernon Whitford’s. 

On behalf of Sir Willoughby, it is, to be said that his 
mother, without infringing on the degree of respect for his 
decisions and sentiments exacted by him, had talked to him 


52 


THE EGOIST 


of Miss Middleton, suggesting a volatility of temperament 
in the young lady, that struck him as consentaneous with 
Mrs. Mountstuart’s “ rogue in porcelain/’ and alarmed him 
as the independent observations of two world-wise women. 
Nor was it incumbent upon him personally to credit thtr 
volatility in order, as far as he could, to effect the soul- 
insurance of his bride, that he might hold the security of 
the policy. The desire for it was in him ; his mother had 
merely tolled a warning bell that he had put in motion before. 
Clara was not a Constantia. But she was a woman, and he 
had been deceived by women, as a man fostering his high 
ideal of them will surely be. The strain he adopted was* 
quite natural to his passion and his theme. The language 
of "the primitive sentiments of men is of the same expression 
at all times, minus the primitive colours when a modern 
gentleman addresses his lady. 

Lady Patterne died in the Winter season of the new year. 
In April Dr. Middleton had to quit Upton Park, and he had 
not found a place of residence, nor did he quite know what 
to do with himself in the prospect of his daughter’s marriage 
and desertion of him. Sir Willoughby proposed to find him 
a house within a circuit of the neighbourhood of Patterne. 
Moreover, he invited the Rev. Doctor and his daughter to 
come to Patterne from Upton for a month, and make ac¬ 
quaintance with his aunts, the ladies Eleanor and Isabel 
Patterne, so that it might not be so strange to Clara to have 
them as her housemates after her marriage. Dr. Middleton 
omitted to consult his daughter before accepting the invita¬ 
tion, and it appeared, when he did speak to her, that it 
should have been done. But she said mildly, “ Very well, 
papa.” 

Sir Willoughby had to visit the metropolis and an estate 
in another county, whence he wrote to his betrothed daily. 
He returned to Patterne in time to arrange for the welcome 
of his guests ; too late, however, to ride over to them; and, 
meanwhile, during his absence, Miss Middleton had be¬ 
thought herself that she ought to have given her last days of 
freedom to her friends. After the weeks to be passed at 
Patterne, very few weeks were left to her, and she had a wish 
to run to Switzerland or Tyrol and see the Alps; a quaint 
idea, her father thought. She repeated it seriously, and Dr. 


HIS COURTSHIP 


53 


Middleton perceived a feminine shuttle of indecision at 
work in her head, frightful to him, considering that they 
signified hesitation between the excellent library and capital 
wine-cellar of Patterne Hall, together with the society of 
that promising young scholar Mr. Vernon Whitford, on the 
one side, and a career of hotels — equivalent to being rammed 
into monster artillery with a crowd every night, and shot off 
on a day’s journey through space every morning — on the 
other. 

“ You will have your travelling and your Alps after the 
ceremony,” he said. 

“ I think I would rather stay at home,” said she. 

Dr. Middleton rejoined : “/would.” 

“ But I am not married yet, papa.” 

“ As good, my dear.” 

“ A little change of scene, I thought . . .” 

“We have accepted Willoughby’s invitation. And he 
helps me to a house near you.” 

“You wish to be near me, papa ?” 

“ Proximate — at a remove : communicable.” 

“ Why should we separate ? ” 

“ For the reason, my dear, that you exchange a father for 
a husband.” 

“ If I do not want to exchange ? ” 

“ To purchase, you must pay, my child. Husbands are 
not given for nothing.” 

“ No. But I should have you, papa ! ” 

“Should?” 

“They have not yet parted us, dear papa.” 

“ What does that mean ? ” he asked fussily. He was in 
a gentle stew already, apprehensive of a disturbance of the 
serenity precious to scholars by postponements of the cere¬ 
mony, and a prolongation of a father’s worries. 

“ Oh, the common meaning, papa,” she said, seeing how 
it was with him. 

“Ah,” said he, nodding and blinking gradually back to a 
state of composure, glad to be appeased on any terms; for 
mutability is but another name for the sex, and it is the 
enemy of the scholar. 

She suggested that two weeks at Patterne would offer 
plenty of time to inspect the empty houses of th** dis« 


54 


THE EGOIST 


trict, and should be sufficient, considering the claims of 
friends, and the necessity for going the round of London 
shops. 

“Two or three weeks ,” he agreed hurriedly, by way of 
compromise with that fearful prospect. 


CHAPTER YII 

THE BETROTHED 

During the drive from Upton to Patterne, Miss Middleton 
hoped, she partly believed, that there was to be a change 
in Sir Willoughby’s manner of courtship. He had been so 
different a wooer. She remembered with some half-conscious 
desperation of fervour what she had thought of him at his 
first approaches, and in accepting him. Had she seen him 
with the eyes of the world, thinking they were her own ? 
That look of his, the look of “indignant contentment,” had 
then been a most noble conquering look, splendid as a 
general’s plume at the gallop. It could not have altered. 
Was it that her eyes had altered ? 

The spirit of those days rose up within her to reproach 
her and whisper of their renewal: she remembered her rosy 
dreams and the image she had of him, her throbbing pride 
in him, her choking richness of happiness: and also her 
vain attempting to be very humble, usually ending in a 
carol, quaint to think of, not without charm, but quaint, 
puzzling. 

Now men whose incomes have been restricted to the ex¬ 
tent that they must live on their capital, soon grow relieved 
of the forethoughtful anguish wasting them by the hilarious 
comforts of the lap upon which they have sunk back, inso¬ 
much that they are apt to solace themselves for their intol¬ 
erable anticipations of famine in the household by giving 
loose to one fit or more of reckless lavishness. Lovers in 
like manner live on their capital from failure of income: 
they, too, for the sake of stifling apprehension and piping 
to the present hour, are lavish of their stock, so as rapidly 



THE BETROTHED 


55 


to attenuate it: they have their fits of intoxication in view 
of coming famine: they force memory into play, love retro¬ 
spectively, enter the old house of the past and ravage the 
larder, and would gladly, even resolutely, continue in illusion 
if it were possible for the broadest honey-store of reminis¬ 
cences to hold out for a length of time against a mortal 
appetite: which in good sooth stands on the alternative of a 
consumption of the hive or of the creature it is for nourish¬ 
ing. Here do lovers show that they are perishable. More 
than the poor clay world they need fresh supplies, right 
wholesome juices; as it were, life in the burst of the bud, 
fruits yet on the tree, rather than potted provender. The 
latter is excellent for by-and-by, when there will be a vast 
deal more to remember, and appetite shall have but one 
tooth remaining. Should their minds perchance have been 
saturated by their first impressions and have retained them, 
loving by the accountable light of reason, they may have 
fair harvests, as in the early time; but that case is rare. 
In other words, love is an affair of two, and is only for two 
that can be as quick, as constant in intercommunication as 
are sun and earth, through the cloud or face to face. They 
take their breath of life from one another in signs of affec¬ 
tion, proofs of faithfulness, incentives to admiration. Thus 
it is with men and women in love’s good season. But a 
solitary soul dragging a log, must make the log a God to 
rejoice in the burden. That is not love. 

Clara was the least fitted of all women to drag a log. 
Few girls would be so rapid in exhausting capital. She 
was feminine indeed, but she wanted comradeship, a living 
and frank exchange of the best in both, with the deeper 
feelings untroubled. To be fixed at the mouth of a mine, 
and to have to descend it daily, and not to discover great 
opulence below; on the contrary, to be chilled in subter¬ 
ranean sunlessness, without any substantial quality that she 
could grasp, only the mystery of inefficient tallow-light in 
those caverns of the complacent talking man: this appeared 
to her too extreme a probation for two or three weeks. 
How of a lifetime of it! 

She was compelled by her nature to hope, expect, and 
believe that Sir Willoughby would again be the man she 
had known when she accepted him. Very singularly, 


56 


THE EGOIST 


to show her simple spirit at the time, she was unaware of 
any physical coldness to him; she knew of nothing but her 
mind at work, objecting to this and that, desiring changes. 
She did not dream of being on the giddy ridge of the pas¬ 
sive or negative sentiment of love, where one step to the 
wrong side precipitates us into the state of repulsion. 

Her eyes were lively at their meeting — so were his. 
She liked to see him on the steps, with young Crossjay 
under his arm. Sir Willoughby told her in his pleasantest 
humour of the boy’s having got into the laboratory that 
morning to escape his taskmaster, and blown out the win¬ 
dows. She administered a chiding to the delinquent in 
the same spirit, while Sir Willoughby led her on his arm 
across the threshold, whispering, “Soon for good!” In 
reply to the whisper, she begged for more of the story of 
young Cross jay. “Come into the laboratory,” said he, a 
little less laughingly than softly; and Clara begged her 
father to come and see young Crossjay’s latest prankc 
Sir Willoughby whispered to her of the length of their 
separation, and his joy to welcome her to the house where 
she would reign as mistress very soon. He numbered the 
weeks. He whispered, “Come.” In the hurry of the 
moment she did not examine a lightning terror that shot 
through her. It passed, and was no more than the shadow 
which bends the summer grasses, leaving a ruffle of her 
ideas, in wonder of her having feared herself for some¬ 
thing. Her father was with them. She and Willoughby 
were not yet alone. 

Young Cross jay had not accomplished so fine a piece of 
destruction as Sir Willoughby’s humour proclaimed of him. 
He had connected a battery with a train of gunpowder, 
shattering a window-frame and unsettling some bricks 
Dr. Middleton asked if the youth was excluded from the 
library, and rejoiced to hear that it was a sealed door to 
him. Thither they went. Vernon Whitford was away on 
one of his long walks. 

“There, papa, you see he is not so very faithful to you,” 
said Clara. 

Dr. Middleton stood frowning over MS. notes on the 
table, in Vernon’s handwriting. He flung up the hair from 
his forehead and dropped into a seat to inspect them 


THE BETROTHED 


57 


closely. He was now immoveable. Clara was obliged to 
leave him there. She was led to think that Willoughby 
had drawn them to the library with the design to be rid oi 
her protector, and she began to fear him. She proposed 
to pay her respects to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel 
They were not seen, and a footman reported in the 
drawing-room that they were out driving. She grasped 
young Crossjay’s hand. Sir Willoughby despatched him 
to Mrs. Montague, the housekeeper, for a tea of cakes and 
jam. 

“ Off! ” he said, and the boy had to run. 

Clara saw herself without a shield. 

" And the garden ! ” she cried. “ I love the garden; J 
must go and see what flowers are up with you. In Spring 
I care most for wild-flowers, and if you will show me 
daffodils, and crocuses, and anemones ...” 

“ My dearest Clara ! my bride ! ” said he. 

“ Because they are vulgar flowers ? ” she asked him 
artlessly, to account for his detaining her. 

Why would he not wait to deserve her!—no, not de¬ 
serve — to reconcile her with her real position; not recon¬ 
cile, but to repair the image of him in her mind, before 
he claimed his apparent right! 

He did not wait. He pressed her to his bosom. 

“ You are mine, my Clara — utterly mine; every thought, 
every feeling. We are one: the world may do its worst. 
I have been longing for you, looking forward. You save 
me from a thousand vexations. One is perpetually 
crossed. That is all outside us. We two! With you I 
am secure! Soon! I could not tell you whether the 
world’s alive or dead. My dearest! ” 

She came out of it with the sensations of the frightened 
child that has had its dip in sea-water, sharpened to think 
that after all it was not so severe a trial. Such was her 
idea; and she said to herself immediately: What am I that 
I should complain ? Two minutes earlier she would not 
have thought it; but humiliated pride falls lower than 
humbleness. 

She did not blame him; she fell in her own esteem; less 
because she was the betrothed Clara Middleton, which was 
now palpable as a shot in the breast of a bird, than that 


58 


THE EGOIST 


she was a captured woman, of whom it is absolutely ex¬ 
pected that she must submit, and when she would rather 
be gazing at flowers. Clara had shame of her sex. They 
cannot take a step without becoming bondwomen; into 
what a slavery! For herself, her trial was over, she 
thought. As for herself, she merely complained of a pre¬ 
matureness and crudity best unanalyzed. In truth, she 
could hardly be said to complain. She did but criticize 
him and wonder that a man was unable to perceive, or was 
not arrested by perceiving, unwillingness, discordance, 
dull compliance; the bondwoman’s due instead of the 
bride’s consent. Oh, sharp distinction, as between two 
spheres! 

She meted him justice; she admitted that he had 
spoken in a lover-like tone. Had it not been for the iter¬ 
ation of “the world,” she would not have objected criti¬ 
cally to his words, though they were words of downright 
appropriation. He had the right to use them, since she 
was to be married to him. But if he had only waited 
before playing the privileged lover! 

Sir Willoughby was enraptured with her. Even so 
purely, coldly, statue-like, Dian-like, would he have pre¬ 
scribed his bride’s reception of his caress. The suffusion 
of crimson coming over her subsequently, showing her 
divinely feminine in reflective bashfulness, agreed with 
his highest definitions of female character. 

“Let me conduct you to the garden, my love,” he said. 

She replied, “I think I would rather go to my room.” 

“I will send you a wild-flower posy.” 

“Flowers, no; I do not like them to be gathered.” 

“ I will wait for you on the lawn.” 

“My head is rather heavy.” 

His deep concern and tenderness brought him close. 

She assured him sparklingly that she was well: she was 
ready to accompany him to the garden and stroll over the 
park. 

“Headache it is not,” she said. 

But she had to pay the fee for inviting a solicitous 
accepted gentleman’s proximity. 

This time she blamed herself and him, and the world 
he abused, and destiny into the bargain. And she cared 


THE BETROTHED 


59 


Jess about the probation; but she craved for liberty. With 
a frigidity that astonished her, she marvelled at the act 
of kissing, and at the obligation it forced upon an inanh 
mate person to be an accomplice. Why was she not free ? 
By what strange right was it that she was treated as a 
possession ? 

“I will try to walk off the heaviness,” she said. 

“My own girl must not fatigue herself.” 

“Oh, no; I shall not.” 

“Sit with me. Your Willoughby is your devoted 
attendant.” 

“I have a desire for the air.” 

“Then we will walk out.” 

She was horrified to think how far she had drawn away 
from him, and now placed her hand on his arm to appease 
her self-accusations and propitiate duty. He spoke as 
she had wished; his manner was what she had wished; 
she was his bride, almost his wife; her conduct was a kind 
of madness; she could not understand it. 

Good sense and duty counselled her to control her way¬ 
ward spirit. 

He fondled her hand, and to that she grew accustomed; 
her hand was at a distance. And what is a hand ? Leav¬ 
ing it where it was, she treated it as a link between her¬ 
self and dutiful goodness. Two months hence she was a 
bondwoman for life! She regretted that she had not gone 
to her room to strengthen herself with a review of her 
situation, and meet him thoroughly resigned to her fate. 
She fancied she would have come down to him amicably. 
It was his present respectfulness and easy conversation 
that tricked her burning nerves with the fancy. Five 
weeks of perfect liberty in the mountains, she thought, 
would have prepared her for the day of bells. All that she 
required was a separation offering new scenes, where she 
might reflect undisturbed, feel clear again. 

He led her about the flower-beds; too much as if he were 
giving a convalescent an airing. She chafed at it, and 
pricked herself with remorse. In contrition she expatiated 
on the beauty of the garden. 

“All is yours, my Clara.” 

An oppressive load it seemed to her! She passively 


60 


THE EGOIST 


yielded to the man in his form of attentive courtier; his 
mansion, estates, and wealth overwhelmed her. They 
suggested the price to be paid. Yet she recollected that 
on her last departure through the park she had been 
proud of the rolling green and spreading trees. Poison of 
some sort must be operating in her. She had not come to 
him to-day with this feeling of sullen antagonism; she 
had caught it here. 

“You have been well, my Clara?” 

** Quite ” 

“Not a hint of illness ?” 

“None.” 

“ My bride must have her health if all the doctors in the 
kingdom die for it! My darling! ” 

“And tell me: the dogs ?” 

“Dogs and horses are in very good condition.” 

“ I am glad. Do you know, I love those ancient Drench 
ch&teaux and farms in one, where salon windows look on 
poultry-yard and stalls. I like that homeliness with 
beasts and peasants.” 

He bowed indulgently. 

“I am afraid we can’t do it for you in England, my 
Jlara.” 

“No.” 

“And I like the farm,” said he. “But I think our 
drawing-rooms have a better atmosphere off the garden. 
As to our peasantry, we cannot, I apprehend, modify our 
class demarcations without risk of disintegrating the social 
structure.” 

“Perhaps. I proposed nothing.” 

“My love, I would entreat you to propose, if I were 
convinced that I could obey.” 

“You are very good.” 

“I find my merit nowhere but in your satisfaction.” 

Although she was not thirsting for dulcet sayings, the 
peacefulness of other than invitations to the exposition 
of his mysteries and of their isolation in oneness, inspired 
her with such calm that she beat about in her brain, as if 
it were in the brain, for the specific injury he had com¬ 
mitted. Sweeping from sensation to sensation, the young, 
whom sensations impel and distract, can rarely date their 


THE BETROTHED 


61 


disturbance from a particular one; unless it be some great 
villain injury that has been done: and Clara had not felt 
an individual shame in his caress; the shame of her sex 
was but a passing protest that left no stamp. So she con¬ 
ceived she had been behaving cruelly, and said, “Wil¬ 
loughby;” because she was aware of the omission of his 
name in her previous remarks. 

His whole attention was given to her. 

She had to invent the sequel: “ I was going to beg you, 
Willoughby, do not seek to spoil me. You compliment 
me. Compliments are not suited to me. You think too 
highly of me. It is nearly as bad as to be slighted. I am 
. . . I am a . . .” But she could not follow his ex¬ 
ample : even as far as she had gone, her prim little sketch 
of herself, set beside her real, ugly, earnest feelings, rang 
of a mincing simplicity, and was a step in falseness. How 
could she display what she was ? 

“ Do I not know you ? ” he said. 

The melodious bass notes, expressive of conviction on 
that point, signified, as well as the words, that no answer 
was the right answer. She could not dissent without 
turning his music to discord, his complacency to amaze¬ 
ment. She held her tongue, knowing that he did not 
know her, and speculating on the division made bare by 
their degrees of the knowledge; a deep cleft. 

He alluded to friends in her neighbourhood and his own. 
The bridesmaids were mentioned. 

“ Miss Dale, you will hear from my Aunt Eleanor, de¬ 
clines, on the plea of indifferent health. She is rather a 
morbid person, with all her really estimable qualities. It 
will do no harm to have none but young ladies of your own 
age; a bouquet of young buds: though one blowing flower 
among them . . . However, she has decided. My prin¬ 
cipal annoyance has been Vernon’s refusal to act as my 
best man.” 

“ Mr. Whitford refuses ? ” 

“He half refuses. I do not take no from him. His 
pretext is a dislike to the ceremony.” 

“I share it with him.” 

“ I sympathize with you. If we might say the words 
and pass from sight! There is a way of cutting off the 


THE EGOIST 


SZ 

world: I have it at times completely: I lose it again, as 
if it were a cabalistic phrase one had to utter. But with 
you! You give it me for good. It will be for ever, eter¬ 
nally, my Clara. Nothing can harm, nothing touch us; 
we are one another’s. Let the world fight it out: we 
have nothing to do with it.” 

“If Mr. Whitford should persist in refusing ?” 

“So entirely one, that there never can be question of 
external influences. I am, we will say, riding home from 
the hunt: I see you awaiting me: I read your heart as 
though you were beside me. And I know that I am com¬ 
ing to the one who reads mine! You have me, you have me 
like an open book, you, and only you ! ” 

“ I am to be always at home ? ” Clara said, unheeded, 
and relieved by his not hearing. 

“ Have you realized it ? — that we are invulnerable ! 
The world cannot hurt us: it cannot touch us. Felicity is 
ours, and we are impervious in the enjoyment of it. 
Something divine ! surely something divine on earth ? 
Clara! — being to one another that between which the 
world can never interpose! What I do is right: what 
you do is right. Perfect to one another! Each new day 
we rise to study and delight in new secrets. Away with 
the crowd! We have not even to say it; we are in an 
atmosphere where the world cannot breathe.” 

“ 0 the world ! ” Clara partly carolled on a sigh that sank 
deep. 

Hearing him talk as one exulting on the mountain top, 
when she knew him to be in the abyss, was very strange, 
provocative of scorn. 

“ My letters ? ” he said incitingly. 

“I read them.” 

“Circumstances have imposed a long courtship on us, 
my Clara: and I, perhaps lamenting the laws of decorum 
— I have done so! — still felt the benefit of the gradual 
initiation. It is not good for women to be surprised by 
a sudden revelation of man’s character. We also have 
things to learn: — there is matter for learning every¬ 
where. Some day you will tell me the difference of what 
you think of me now, from what you thought when we 
first . . . ?” 


THE BETROTHED 


An impulse of double-minded acquiescence caused Clara 
to stammer as on a sob, — 

“I — I daresay I shall.” 

She added: “If it is necessary.” 

Then she cried out. “ Why do you attack the world ? 
You always make me pity it.” 

He smiled at her youthfulness. “I have passed through 
that stage. It leads to my sentiment. Pity it, by all 
means.” 

“No,” said she, “but pity it, side with it, not consider 
it so bad. The world has faults; glaciers have crevasses, 
mountains have chasms; but is not the effect of the whole 
sublime ? not to admire the mountain and the glacier be¬ 
cause they can be cruel, seems to me . . . And the world 
is beautiful.” 

“ The world of nature, yes. The world of men ? ” 

“Yes.” 

“ My love, I suspect you to be thinking of the world of 
ball-rooms.” 

“I am thinking of the world that contains real and 
great generosity, true heroism. We see it round us.” 

“We read of it. The world of the romance-writer! ” 

“No: the living world. I am sure it is our duty to 
love it. I am sure we weaken ourselves if we do not. If 
I did not, I should be looking on mist, hearing a perpetual 
boom instead of music. I remember hearing Mr. Whit- 
ford say that cynicism is intellectual dandyism without 
the coxcomb’s feathers; and it seems to me that cynics are 
only happy in making the world as barren to others as they 
have made it for themselves.” 

“ Old Vernon! ” ejaculated Sir Willoughby, with a coun¬ 
tenance rather uneasy, as if it had been flicked with a 
glove. “He strings his phrases by the dozen.” 

“ Papa contradicts that, and says he is very clever and 
very simple.” 

“As to cynics, my dear Clara, oh! certainly, certainly: 
you are right. They are laughable, contemptible. But 
understand me, I mean, we cannot feel, or if we feel we 
cannot so intensely feel, our oneness, except by dividing 
ourselves from the world.” 

“ Is it an art ? ” 


64 


THE EGOIST 


“ If you like. It is our poetry! But does not love shun 
the world ? Two that love must have their substance in 
isolation.” 

“No: they will be eating themselves up.” 

“The purer the beauty, the more it will be out of the 
world.” 

“But not opposed.” 

“Put it in this way,” Willoughby condescended. “Has 
experience the same opinion of the world as ignorance ?” 

“It should have more charity.” 

“ Does virtue feel at home in the world ? ” 

“Where it should be an example, to my idea.” 

“ Is the world agreeable to holiness ? ” 

“ Then, are you in favour of monasteries ? ” 

He poured a little runlet of half-laughter over her head, 
of the sound assumed by genial compassion. 

It is irritating to hear that when we imagine we have 
spoken to the point. 

“Now in my letters, Clara . . .” 

“I have no memory, Willoughby ! ” 

“You will however have observed that lam not com* 
pletely myself in my letters ...” 

“In your letters to men, you may be.” 

The remark threw a pause across his thoughts. He was 
of a sensitiveness terribly tender. A single strdke on it 
reverberated swellingly within the man, and most, and 
infuriately searching, at the spots where he had been 
wounded, especially where he feared the world might have 
guessed the wound. Did she imply that he had no hand 
for love-letters ? Was it her meaning that women would 
not have much taste for his epistolary correspondence? 
She had spoken in the plural, with an accent on “men.” 
Had she heard of Constantia? Had she formed her own 
judgement about the creature ? The supernatural sensi¬ 
tiveness of Sir Willoughby shrieked a peal of affirmatives. 
He had often meditated on the moral obligation of his 
unfolding to Clara the whole truth of his conduct to Con- 
gtantia; for whom, as for other suicides, there were 
excuses. He at least was bound to supply them. She 
had behaved badly; but had he not given her some cause T 
If so, manliness was bound to confess it. 


THE BETROTHED 


65 


Supposing Clara heard the world’s version first! Men 
whose pride is their backbone suffer convulsions where 
other men are barely aware of a shock, and Sir Willoughby 
was taken with galvanic jumpings of the spirit within him, 
at the idea of the world whispering to Clara that he had 
been jilted. 

“ My letters to men, you say, my love ? ” 

“Your letters of business.” 

“ Completely myself in my letters of business ? ” He 
stared indeed. 

She relaxed the tension of his figure by remarking: 
“ You are able to express yourself to men as your meaning 
dictates. In writing to ... to us it is, I suppose, more 
difficult.” 

“True, my love. I will not exactly say difficult. I 
can acknowledge no difficulty. Language, I should say, 
is not fitted to express emotion. Passion rejects it.” 

“For dumb-show and pantomime?” 

“No: but the writing of it coldly.” 

“Ah, coldly!” 

“ My letters disappoint you ? ” 

“I have not implied that they do.” 

“My feelings, dearest, are too strong for transcription. 
I feel, pen in hand, like the mythological Titan at war 
with Jove, strong enough to hurl mountains, and finding 
nothing but pebbles. The simile is a good one. You must 
not judge of me by my letters.” 

“ I do not; I like them,” said Clara. 

She blushed, eyed him hurriedly, and seeing him com¬ 
placent, resumed: “I prefer the pebble to the mountain; 
but if you read poetry you would not think human speech 
incapable of . . .” 

“My love, I detest artifice. Poetry is a profession.” 

“Our poets would prove to you ...” 

“As I have often observed, Clara, I am no poet.” 

“I have not accused you, Willoughby.” 

“No poet, and with no wish to be a poet. Were I one, 
my life would supply material, I can assure you, my love. 
My conscience is not entirely at rest. Perhaps the heav« 
iest matter troubling it is that in which I was least wil¬ 
fully guilty. You have heard of a Miss Durham ?” 


66 


THE EGOIST 


“I have heard — yes — of her.” 

“ She may be happy. I trust she is. If she is not, I 
cannot escape some blame. An instance of the difference 
between myself and the world, now. The world charges 
it upon her. I have interceded to exonerate her.” 

“That was generous, Willoughby.” 

“ Stay. I fear I was the primary offender. But I, Clara, 
I, under a sense of honour, acting under a sense of honour, 
would have carried my engagement through.” 

“ What had you done ? ” 

“The story is long, dating from an early day, in the 
* downy antiquity of my youth,’ as Vernon says.” 

“ Mr. Whitford says that ? ” 

“One of old Vernon’s odd sayings. It’s a story of an 
early fascination.” 

“ Papa tells me Mr. Whitford speaks at times with wise 
humour.” 

“ Family considerations — the lady’s health among other 
things; her position in the calculations of relatives — in¬ 
tervened. Still there was the fascination. I have to own 
it. Grounds for feminine jealousy.” 

“ Is it at an end ? ” 

“'Now ? with you ? my darling Clara! indeed at an end, 
or could I have opened my inmost heart to you! Could I 
have spoken of myself so unreservedly that in part you 
know me as I know myself! Oh! but would it have been 
possible to enclose you with myself in that intimate 
union ? so secret, unassailable!” 

“You did not speak to her as you speak to me ?” 

“ In no degree.” 

“What could have! ...” Clara checked the murmured 
exclamation. 

Sir Willoughby’s expoundings on his latest of texts 
would have poured forth, had not a footman stepped across 
the lawn to inform him that his builder was in the labora¬ 
tory and requested permission to consult with him. 

Clara’s plea of a horror of a talk of bricks and joists 
excused her from accompanying him. He had hardly 
been satisfied by her manner, he knew not why. He left 
her, convinced that he must do and say more to reach 
down to her female intelligence. 


A RUN WITH THE TRUANT 


67 


She saw young Crossjay, springing with pots of jam in 
him, join his patron at a bound, and taking a lift of arms, 
fly aloft, clapping heels. Her reflections were confused. 
Sir Willoughby was admirable with the lad. “Is he two 
men?” she thought: and the thought ensued: “Am I unjust?” 
She headed a run with young Crossjay to divert her mind. 


CHAPTER Till 

A RUN WITH THE TRUANT; A WALK WITH THE MASTER. 

The sight of Miss Middleton running inflamed young 
Crossjay with the passion of the game of hare and hounds. 
He shouted a view-halloo, and flung up his legs. She was 
fleet; she ran as though a hundred little feet were bearing 
her onward smooth as water over the lawn and the sweeps 
of grass of the park, so swiftly did the hidden pair multiply 
one another to speed her. So sweet was she in her flowing 
pace, that the boy, as became his age, translated admiration 
into a dogged frenzy of pursuit, and continued pounding 
along, when far outstripped, determined to run her down 
or die. Suddenly her flight wound to an end in a dozen 
twittering steps, and she sank. Young Crossjay attained 
her, with just breath enough to say, “You are a runner!” 

“I forgot you had been having your tea, my poor boy,” 
said she. 

“And you don’t pant a bit!” was his encomium. 

“Dear me, no; not more than a bird. You might as well' 
try to catch a bird.” 

Young Crossjay gave a knowing nod. “Wait till I get 
my second wind.” 

“Now you must confess that girls run faster than boys.” 

“They may at the start.” 

“They do everything better.” 

“They’re flash-in-the-pans.” 

“They learn their lessons.” 

“You can’t make soldiers or sailors of them, though.’* 



THE EGOIST 


“And that is untrue. Have you never read of Mary 
Ambree ? and Mistress Hannah Snell of Pondicherry ? 
And there was the bride of the celebrated William Taylor. 
And what do you say to Joan of Arc ? What do you say 
to Boadicea ? I suppose you have never heard of the 
Amazons. ” 

“ They were n’t English.” 

“ Then, it is your own countrywomen you decry, sir! ” 

Young Crossjay betrayed anxiety about his false posi* 
tion, and begged for the stories of Mary Ambree and th* 
others who were English. 

“ See, you will not read for yourself, you hide and play 
truant with Mr. Whitford, and the consequence is you are 
ignorant of your country’s history! ” 

Miss Middleton rebuked him, enjoying his wriggle be¬ 
tween a perception of her fun and an acknowledgement of 
his peccancy. She commanded him to tell her which was 
the glorious Valentine’s day of our naval annals; the name 
of the hero of the day, and the name of his ship. To these 
questions his answers were as ready as the guns of the 
good ship Captain for the Spanish* four-decker. 

“And that you owe to Mr. Whitford,” said Miss Mid¬ 
dleton. 

“ He bought me the books, ” young Crossjay growled, and 
plucked at grass-blades and bit them, foreseeing dimly but 
certainly the termination of all this. 

Miss Middleton lay back on the grass, and said: “Are 
you going to be fond of me, Crossjay ? ” 

The boy sat blinking. His desire was to prove to her 
that he was immoderately fond of her already; and he 
might have flown at her neck had she been sitting up, but 
her recumbency and eyelids half closed excited wonder in 
him and awe. His young heart beat fast. 

“ Because, my dear boy,” she said, leaning on her elbow, 
“you are a very nice boy, but an ungrateful boy, and there 
is no telling whether you will not punish anyone who 
cares for you. Come along with me; pluck me some of 
these cowslips, and the speedwells near them; I think we 
both love wild-flowers.” She rose and took his arm. 
“You shall row me on the lake while I talk to you 
seriously.” 


A RUN WITH THE TRUANT 


69 


It was she, however, who took the sculls at the boat* 
house, for she had been a playfellow with boys, and knew 
that one of them engaged in a manly exercise is not likely 
to listen to a woman. 

“Now, Crossjay,” she said. Dense gloom overcame him 
like a cowl. She bent across her hands to laugh. “ As 
if I were going to lecture you, you silly boy! ” He began 
to brighten dubiously. “ I used to be as fond of birdsnest- 
ing as you are. I like brave boys, and I like you for want¬ 
ing to enter the Royal Navy. Only, how can you if you 
do not learn ? You must get the captains to pass you, you 
know. Somebody spoils you: Miss Dale or Mr. Whitford.” 

“ Do they! ” sang out young Crossjay. 

“ Sir Willoughby does ? ” 

“I don’t know about spoil. I can come round him.” 

“ I am sure he is very kind to you. I daresay you think 
Mr. Whitford rather severe. You should remember he 
has to teach you, so that you may pass for the navy. You 
must not dislike him because he makes you work. Sup¬ 
posing you had blown yourself up to-day! You would 
have thought it better to have been working with Mr. 
Whitford.” 

“Sir Willoughby says, when he’s married, you won’t 
let me hide.” 

“Ah! It is wrong to pet a big boy like you. Does not 
he what you call tip you, Cross jay ? ” 

“ Generally half-crown pieces. I ’ve had a crown-piece. 
I ’ve had sovereigns.” 

“ And for that you do as he bids you ? and he indulges 
you because you . . . Well, but though Mr. Whitford 
does not give you monev, he gives you his time, he tries 
to get you into the navy.” 

“He pays for me.” 

“ What do you say ? ” 

“ My keep. And, as for liking him, if he were at the 
bottom of the water here, I’d go down after him. I mean 
to learn. We ’re both of us here at six o’clock in the 
morning, when it’s light, and have a swim. He taught 
me. Only, I never cared for school-books.” 

“ Are you quite certain that Mr. Whitford pays for you ? ” 

“My father told me he did, and I must obey him. He 


70 


THE EGOIST. 


heard my father was poor, with a family. He went down 
to see my father. My father came here once, and Sir Wil¬ 
loughby wouldn’t see him. I know Mr. Whitford does. And 
Miss Dale told me he did. My mother says she thinks he 
does it to make up to us for my father’s long walk in the 
rain, and the cold he caught coming here to Patterne.” 

“So you see you should not vex him, Crossjay. He is 
a good friend to your father and to you. You ought to 
love him.” 

“I like him, and I like his face.” 

“Why his face?” 

“It’s not like those faces! Miss Dale and I talk about 
him. She thinks that Sir Willoughby is the best-looking 
man ever born.” 

“Were you not speaking of Mr. Whitford?” 

“Yes; old Vernon. That’s what Sir Willoughby calls him,” 
young Crossjay excused himself to her look of surprise. 
“Do you know what he makes me think of?—his eyes, I 
mean. He makes me think of Robinson Crusoe’s old goat 
in the cavern. I like him because he’s always the same, 
and you’re not positive about some people. Miss Middleton, 
if you look on at cricket, in comes a safe man for ten runs. 
He may get more, and he never gets less; and you should 
hear the old farmers talk of him in the booth. That’s just 
my feeling.” 

Miss Middleton understood that some illustration from 
the cricketing-field was intended to throw light on the boy’s 
feeling for Mr. Whitford. Young Crossjay was evidently warm¬ 
ing to speak from his heart. But the sun was low, she had 
to dress for the dinner-table, and she landed him with 
regret, as at a holiday over. Before they parted, he offered 
to swim across the lake in his clothes, or dive to the bed 
for anything she pleased to throw, declaring solemnly that 
it should not be lost. 

She walked back at a slow pace, and sang to herself 
above her darker-flowing thoughts, like the reed-warbler on 
the branch beside the night-stream; a simple song of a 
light-hearted sound, independent of the shifting black and 
grey of the flood underneath. 

A step was at her heels. 


A BUN WITH THE TRUANT 


73 


“I see you have been petting my scapegrace.” 

“Mr. Whitford ! Yes; not petting, I hope. I tried to 
give him a lecture. He ’s a dear lad, but, I fancy, trying.” 

She was in fine sunset colour, unable to arrest the 
mounting tide. She had been rowing, she said; and, as 
he directed his eyes, according to his wont, penetratingly, 
she defended herself by fixing her mind on Robinson 
Crusoe’s old goat in the recess of the cavern. 

“I must have him away from here very soon,” said 
Vernon. “Here he’s quite spoilt. Speak of him to Wil¬ 
loughby. I can’t guess at his ideas of the boy’s future, 
but the chance of passing for the navy won’t bear trifling 
with; and if ever there was a lad made for the navy, it’s 
Crossjay.” 

The incident of the explosion in the laboratory was new 
to Vernon. 

“And Willoughby laughed ?” he said. “There are sea¬ 
port crammers who stuff young fellows for examination, 
and we shall have to pack off the boy at once to the best 
one of the lot we can find. I would rather have had him 
under me up to the last three months, and have made sure 
of some roots to what is knocked into his head. But he ’s 
ruined here. And I am going. So I shall not trouble 
him for many weeks longer. Dr. Middleton is well ? ” 

“My father is well, yes. He pounced like a falcon on 
your notes in the library.” 

Vernon came out with a chuckle. 

“They were left to attract him. I am in for a con¬ 
troversy.” 

“Papa will not spare you, to judge from his look.” 

“I know the look.” 

“ Have you walked far to-day ? ” 

“Nine and a half hours. My Flibbertigibbet is too 
much for me at times, and I had to walk off my temper.” 

She cast her eyes on him, thinking of the pleasure of 
dealing with a temper honestly coltish, and manfully open 
to a specific. 

“ All those hours were required ? ” 

“Not quite so long.” 

“ You are training for your Alpine tour.” 

“It’s doubtful whether I shall get to the Alps this year. 




72 


THE EGOIST 


I leave the Hall, and shall probably be in London with a 
pen to sell.” 

“ Willoughby knows that you leave him ?” 

“As much as Mont Blanc knows 1 that he is going to be 
climbed by a party below. He sees a speck or two in the 
valley.” 

“He has not spoken of it.” 

“He would attribute it to changes ...” 

Vernon did not conclude the sentence. 

She became breathless, without emotion, but checked by 
the barrier confronting an impulse to ask, What changes ? 
She stooped to pluck a cowslip. 

“I saw daffodils lower down the park,” she said. “One 
or two; they ’re nearly over.” 

“We are well-off for wild-flowers here,” he answered. 

“Do not leave him, Mr. Whitford.” 

“He will not want me.” 

“You are devoted to him.” 

“I can’t pretend that.” 

“Then it is the changes you imagine you foresee . . . ? 
If any occur, why should they drive you away ? ” 

“Well, I ’m two and thirty, and have never been in the 
fray: a kind of nondescript, half-scholar, and by nature 
half billman or bowman or musketeer; if I’m worth any¬ 
thing, London’s the field for me. But that ; s what I have 
to try.” 

“Papa will not like your serving with your pen in 
London: he will say you are worth too much for that.” 

“Good men are at it; I should not care to be ranked 
above them.” 

“They are wasted, he says.” 

“Error! If they have their private ambition, they may 
suppose they are wasted. But the value to the world of 
a private ambition I do not clearly understand.” 

“ You have not an evil opinion of the world ? ” said Miss 
Middleton, sick at heart as she spoke, with the sensation 
of having invited herself to take a drop of poison. 

He replied: “ One might as well have an evil opinion of a 
river: here it’s muddy, there it’s clear; one day troubled, 
another at rest.' We have to treat it with common sense.” 
“Love it?” 


A RUN WITH THE TRUANT 


78 


“In the sense of serving it.” 

“ Not think it beautiful ? ” 

“Part of it is, part it the reverse.” 

“Papa would quote the ‘ mulier formosa.*” 

“ Except that 1 fish ’ is too good for the black extremity, 
* Woman * is excellent for the upper.” 

“ How do you say that ? — not cynically, I believe. 
Your view commends itself to my reason.” 

She was grateful to him for not stating it in ideal con¬ 
trast with Sir Willoughby’s view. If he had, so intensely 
did her youthful blood desire to be enamoured of the world, 
that she felt he would have lifted her off her feet. For a 
moment a gulf beneath had been threatening. When she 
said, “ Love it ? ” a little enthusiasm would have wafted 
her into space fierily as wine; but the sober, “ In the sense 
of serving it,” entered her brain, and was matter for reflec¬ 
tion upon it and him. 

She could think of him in pleasant liberty, uncorrected 
by her woman’s instinct of peril. He had neither arts 
nor graces; nothing of his cousin’s easy social front-face. 
She had once witnessed the military precision of his danc¬ 
ing, and had to learn to like him before she ceased to pray 
that she might never be the victim of it as his partner. 
He walked heroically, his pedestrian vigour being famous, 
but that means one who walks away from the sex, not 
excelling in the recreations where men and women join 
hands. He was not much of a horseman either. Sir Wil¬ 
loughby enjoyed seeing him on horseback. And he could 
scarcely be said to shine in a drawing-room, unless when 
seated beside a person ready for real talk. Even more 
than his merits, his demerits pointed him out as a man 
to be a friend to a young woman who wanted one. His 
way of life pictured to her troubled spirit an enviable 
smoothness: and his having achieved that smooth way she 
considered a sign of strength; and she wished to lean in 
idea upon some friendly strength. His reputation for 
indifference to the frivolous charms of girls clothed him 
with a noble coldness, and gave him the distinction of a 
far-seen solitary iceberg in Southern waters. The popular 
• < 'iion of hereditary titled aristocracy resembles her senti¬ 
ment for a man that would not flatter and could not be 


74 


THE EGOIST 


flattered by her sex: he appeared superior almost So 
awfulness. She was young, but she had received much 
flattery in her ears, and by it she had been snaredj and 
he, disdaining to practise the fowler’s arts or to cast a 
thought on small fowls, appeared to her to have a pride 
founded on natural loftiness. 

They had not spoken for a while, when Vernon said 
abruptly: “The boy’s future rather depends on you, Miss 
Middleton. I mean to leave as soon as possible, and I do 
not like his being here without me, though you will look 
after him, I have no doubt. But you may not at first see 
where the spoiling hurts him. He should be packed off at 
once to the crammer, before you are Lady Patterne. Use 
your influence. Willoughby will support the lad at your 
request. The cost cannot be great. There are strong 
grounds against my having him in London, even if I could 
manage it. May I count on you ? ” 

“I will mention it: I will do my best,” said Miss Mid¬ 
dleton, strangely dejected. 

They were now on the lawn, where Sir Willoughby was 
walking with the ladies Eleanor and Isabel, his maiden 
aunts. 

“You seem to have coursed the hare and captured the 
hart,” he said to his bride. 

“ Started the truant and run down the paedagogue,” said 
Vernon. 

“Ay, you won’t listen to me about the management of 
that boy,” Sir Willoughby retorted. 

The ladies embraced Miss Middleton. One offered up 
an ejaculation in eulogy of her looks, the other of her 
healthfulness: then both remarked that with indulgence 
young Crossjay could be induced to do anything. Clara 
wondered whether inclination or Sir Willoughby had dis¬ 
ciplined their individuality out of them and made them his 
shadows, his echoes. She gazed from them to him, and 
feared him. But as yet she had not experienced the power 
in him which could threaten and wrestle to subject the 
members of his household to the state of satellites. Though 
she had in fact been giving battle to it for several months, 
she had held her own too well to perceive definitely th^ 
character of the spirit opposing her. 


CLARA AND L^TITIA MEET 


75 


She said to the ladies: “Ah, no! Mr. Whitford has 
chosen the only method for teaching a boy like Crossjay.” 

“I propose to make a man of him,” said Sir Willoughby. 

“ What is to become of him if he learns nothing ? ” 

“If he pleases me, he will be provided for. I have never 
abandoned a dependant.” 

Clara let her eyes rest on his, and without turning or 
dropping, shut them. 

The effect was discomforting to him. He was very 
sensitive to the intentions of eyes and tones; which was 
one secret of his rigid grasp of the dwellers in his house¬ 
hold. They were taught that they had to render agreement 
under sharp scrutiny. Studious eyes, devoid of warmth, 
devoid of the shyness of sex, that suddenly closed on their 
look, signified a want of comprehension of some kind, it 
might be hostility of understanding. Was it possible he 
did not possess her utterly ? He frowned up. 

Clara saw the lift of his brows, and thought: “My mind 
is my own, married or not.” 

It was the point in dispute. 


CHAPTER IX 

CLARA AND LA3TITIA MEET: THEY ARE COMPARED 

An hour before the time for lessons next morning young 
Crossjay was on the lawn with a big bunch of wild-flowers. 
He left them at the Hall-door for Miss Middleton, and 
vanished into bushes. 

These vulgar weeds were about to be dismissed to the 
dust-heap by the great officials of the household; but as it 
happened that Miss Middleton had seen them from the 
window in Crossjay’s hands, the discovery was made that 
they were indeed his presentation-bouquet, and a footman 
received orders to place them before her. She was very 
pleased. The arrangement of the flowers bore witness to 
fairer fingers than the boy’s own in the disposition of the 
rings of colour, red campion and anemone, cowslip and 



76 


THE EGOIST 


speedwell, primroses and wood-hyacinths; and rising out 
of the blue was a branch bearing thick white blossom, so 
thick, and of so pure a whiteness, that Miss Middleton, 
while praising Crossjay for soliciting the aid of Miss Dale, 
was at a loss to name the tree. 

“It is a gardener’s improvement on the Vestal of the 
forest, the wild cherry,” said Dr. Middleton, “and in this 
case we may admit the gardener’s claim to be valid, 
though I believe that, with his gift of double-blossom, he 
has improved away the fruit. Call this the Vestal of civili¬ 
zation, then; he has at least done something to vindicate the 
beauty of the office as well as the justness of the title.” 

“It is Vernon’s Holy Tree the young rascal has been 
despoiling,” said Sir Willoughby merrily. 

Miss Middleton was informed that this double-blossom 
wild cherry-tree was worshipped by Mr. Whitford. 

Sir Willoughby promised he would conduct her to it. 
“You,” he said to her, “can bear the trial; few complex¬ 
ions can; it is to most ladies a crueller test than snow. 
Miss Dale, for example, becomes old lace within a dozen 
yards of it. I should like to place her under the tree 
beside you.” 

“Dear me, though; but that is investing the hama¬ 
dryad with novel and terrible functions,” exclaimed Dr. 
Middleton. 

Clara said, “ Miss Dale could drag me into a superior 
Court to show me fading beside her in gifts more valuable 
than a complexion.” 

“She has a fine ability,” said Vernon. 

All the world knew, so Clara knew of Miss Dale’s 
romantic admiration of Sir Willoughby; she was curious to 
see Miss Dale and study the nature of a devotion that might 
be, within reason, imitable — for a man who could speak 
with such steely coldness of the poor lady he had fascinated ? 
Well, perhaps it was good for the hearts of women to be 
beneath a frost; to be schooled, restrained, turned inward 
on their dreams. Yes, then, his coldness was desireable ; it 
encouraged an ideal of him. It suggested and seemed to 
propose to Clara’s mind the divineness of separation instead 
of the deadly accuracy of an intimate perusal. She tried to 
look on him as Miss Dale might look, and while partly de* 


CLARA AND L^ETITIA MEET 


77 


spising her for the dupery she envied, and more than criti¬ 
cizing him for the inhuman numbness of sentiment which 
offered up his worshipper to point a complimentary com¬ 
parison, she was able to imagine a distance whence it would 
be possible to observe him uncritically, kindly, admiringly; 
as the moon a handsome mortal, for example. 

In the midst of her thoughts, she surprised herself by 
saying: “ I certainly was difficult to instruct. I might see 
things clearer if I had a fine ability, I never remember to 
have been perfectly pleased with my immediate lesson ...” 

She stopped, wondering whither her tongue was leading 
her; then added, to save herself, “ And that may be why I 
feel for poor Crossjay.” 

Mr. Whitford apparently did not think it remarkable that 
she should have been set off gabbling of “ a fine ability,” 
though the eulogistic phrase had been pronounced by him 
with an impressiveness to make his ear aware of an echo. 

Sir Willoughby dispersed her vapourish confusion. 
“Exactly,” he said. “I have insisted with Vernon, I don’t 
know how often, that you must have the lad by his affec¬ 
tions. He won’t bear driving. It had no effect on me. 
Boys of spirit kick at it. I think I know boys, Clara.” 

He found himself addressing eyes that regarded him as 
though he were a small speck, a pin’s head, in the circle of 
their remote contemplation. They were wide j they closed. 

She opened them to gaze elsewhere. 

He was very sensitive. 

Even then, when knowingly wounding him, or because of 
it, she was trying to climb back to that altitude of the thin 
division of neutral ground, from which we see a lover’s 
faults and are above them, pure surveyors. She climbed 
unsuccessfully, it is true; soon despairing and using the 
effort as a pretext to fall back lower. 

Dr. Middleton withdrew Sir Willoughby’s attention from 
the imperceptible annoyance, — 

“ No, sir, no: the birch ! the birch ! Boys of spirit com¬ 
monly turn into solid men, and the solider the men the 
more surely do they vote for Busby. For me, I pray he 
may be immortal in Great Britain. Sea-air nor mountain- 
air is half so bracing. I venture to say that the power to 
take a licking is better worth having than the power to ad« 


THE EGOIST 


78 

minister one. Horse him and birch him if Crossjay runs 
from his books.” 

“ It is your opinion, sir ? ” his host bowed to him affably, 
shocked on behalf of the ladies. 

“ So positively so, sir, that I will undertake without 
knowledge of their antecedents, to lay my finger on the men 
in public life who have not had early Busby. They are ill- 
balanced men. Their seat of reason is not a concrete. They 
won’t take rough and smooth as they come. They make 
bad blood, can’t forgive, sniff right and left for approbation, 
and are excited to anger if an East wind does not flatter 
them. Why, sir, when they have grown to be seniors, you 
find these men mixed up with the nonsense of their youth; 
you see they are unthreshed. We English beat the world 
because we take a licking well. I hold it for a surety of a 
proper sweetness of blood.” 

The smile of Sir Willoughby waxed ever softer as the 
shakes of his head increased in contradictoriness. “ And 
yet,” said he, with the air of conceding a little after having 
answered the Rev. Doctor and convicted him of error, 
“ Jack requires it to keep him in order. On board ship 
your argument may apply. Not, I suspect, among gentle¬ 
men. No.” 

“ Good night to your gentlemen! ” said Dr. Middleton. 

Clara heard Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel interchange 
remarks, — 

“ Willoughby would not have suffered it! ” 

“ It would entirely have altered him ! ” 

She sighed and put a tooth on her underlip. The gift of 
humourous fancy is in women fenced round with forbidding 
placards; they have to choke it; if they perceive a piece of 
humour, for instance, the young Willoughby grasped by his 
master, and his horrified relatives rigid at the sight of prep¬ 
arations for the deed of sacrilege, they have to blindfold 
the mind’s eye. They are society’s hard-drilled soldiery, 
Prussians that must both march and think in step. It is 
for the advantage of the civilized world, if you like, since 
men have decreed it, or matrons have so read the decree; 
but here and there a younger woman, haply an uncorrected 
insurgent of the sex matured here and there, feels that he/ 
lot was cast with her head in a narrower pit thaD her limbs* 


CLARA AND LiETITIA MEET 


79 


Clara speculated as to whether Miss Dale might he per¬ 
chance a person of a certain liberty of mind. She asked for 
some little, only some little, free play of mind in a house 
that seemed to wear, as it were, a cap of iron. Sir Wil¬ 
loughby not merely ruled, he throned, he inspired: and 
how ? She had noticed an irascible sensitiveness in him 
alert against a shadow of disagreement; and as he was kind 
when perfectly appeased, the sop was offered by him for 
submission. She noticed that even Mr. Whitford forbore 
to alarm the sentiment of authority in his cousin. If he did 
not breathe Sir Willoughby, like the ladies Eleanor and 
Isabel, he would either acquiesce in a syllable, or be silent. 
He never strongly dissented. The habit of the house, with 
its iron cap, was on him; as it was on the servants, and 
would be, oh, shudders of the shipwrecked that see their 
end in drowning! on the wife. 

“ When do I meet Miss Dale ? ” she inquired. 

“This very evening, at dinner,” replied Sir Willoughby. 

Then, thought she, there is that to look forward to! 

She indulged her morbid fit, and shut up her senses that 
she might live in the anticipation of meeting Miss Dale; 
and, long before the approach of the hour, her hope of 
encountering any other than another dull adherent of Sir 
Willoughby had fled. So she was languid for two of the 
three minutes when she sat alone with Laetitia in the 
drawing-room before the ladies had assembled. 

“It is Miss Middleton?” Laetitia said,advancing to her. 
“ My jealousy tells me; for you have won my boy Crossjay’s 
heart, and done more to bring him to obedience in a few 
minutes than we have been able to do in months.” 

“His wild-flowers were so welcome to me,” said Clara. 

“He was very modest over them. And I mention it 
because boys of his age usually thrust their gifts in our 
faces fresh as they pluck them, and you were to be treated 
quite differently.” 

“We saw his good fairy’s hand.” 

“ She resigns her office; but I pray you not to love him 
too well in return ; for he ought to be away reading with 
one of those men who get boys through their examinations. 
He is, we all think, a born sailor, and his place is in the 
navy.” 


80 


THE EGOIST 


“ But, Miss Dale, I love him so well that I shall consult 
his interests and not my own selfishness. And, if I have 
influence, he will not be a week with you longer. It should 
have been spoken of to-day; I must have been in some 
dream; I thought of it, I know. I will not forget to do 
what may be in my power.” 

Clara’s heart sank at the renewed engagement and plight¬ 
ing of herself involved in her asking a favour, urging any 
sort of petition. The cause was good. Besides, she was 
plighted already. 

“ Sir Willoughby is really fond of the boy,” she said. 

“ He is fond of exciting fondness in the boy,” said Miss 
Dale. “ He has not dealt much with children. I am sure 
he likes Cross jay ; he could not otherwise be so forbearing; 
it is wonderful what he endures and laughs at.” 

Sir Willoughby entered. The presence of Miss Dale 
illuminated him as the burning taper lights up consecrated 
plate. Deeply respecting her for her constancy, esteeming 
her for a model of taste, he was never in her society without 
that happy consciousness of shining which calls forth the 
treasures of the man ; and these it is no exaggeration to 
term unbounded, when all that comes from him is taken for 
gold. 

The effect of the evening on Clara was to render her dis¬ 
trustful of her later antagonism. She had unknowingly 
passed into the spirit of Miss Dale, Sir Willoughby aiding ; 
for she could sympathize with the view of his constant 
admirer on seeing him so cordially and smoothly gay; as 
one may say, domestically witty, the most agreeable form of 
wit. Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson discerned that he had a 
leg of physical perfection ; Miss Dale distinguished it in him 
in the vital essence; and before either of these ladies he was 
not simply a radiant, he was a productive creature, so true 
it is that praise is our fructifying sun. He had even a touch 
of the romantic air which Clara remembered as her first im¬ 
pression of the favourite of the county: and strange she 
found it to observe this resuscitated idea confronting her 
experience. What if she had been captious, inconsiderate ? 
0 blissful revival of the sense of peace! The happiness of 
pain departing was all that she looked for, and her concep¬ 
tion of liberty was to learn to love her chains, provided that 


CLARA AND LASTITIA MEET 


81 


he would spare her the caress. In this mood she sternly 
condemned Constantia. “We must try to do good; we must 
not be thinking of ourselves ; we must make the best of our 
path in life.” She revolved these infantile precepts with 
humble earnestness; and not to be tardy in her striving to 
do good, with a remote but pleasurable glimpse of Mr. 
Whitford hearing of it, she took the opportunity to speak 
to Sir Willoughby on the subject of young Cross jay, at a 
moment when, alighting from horseback, he had shown him¬ 
self to advantage among a gallant cantering company. He 
showed to great advantage on horseback among men, being 
invariably the best mounted, and he had a cavalierly style, 
possibly cultivated, but effective. On foot his raised head 
and half-dropped eyelids too palpably assumed superiority. 
“ Willoughby, I want to speak,” she said, and shrank as 
she spoke, lest he should immediately grant everything in 
the mood of courtship, and invade her respite; “ I want 
to speak of that dear boy Cross jay. You are fond of him. 
He is rather an idle boy here, and wasting time ...” 

“ Now you are here, and when you are here for good, my 
love, for good ...” he fluted away in loverliness, forgetful 
of Crossjay, whom he presently took up. “The boy recog¬ 
nizes his most sovereign lady, and will do your bidding, 
though you should order him to learn his lessons ! Who 
would not obey ? Your beauty alone commands. But what 
is there beyond? — a grace, a hue divine, that sets you not 
so much above as apart, severed from the world.” 

Clara produced an active smile in duty, and pursued: “ If 
Crossjay were sent at once to some house where men prepare 
boys to pass for the navy, he would have his chance, and 
the navy is distinctly his profession. His father is a brave 
man, and he inherits bravery, and he has a passion, for a 
sailor’s life; only he must be able to pass his examination, 
and he has not much time.” 

Sir Willoughby gave a slight laugh in sad amusement. 

“ My dear Clara, you adore the world; and I suppose you 
have to learn that there is not a question in this wrangling 
world about which we have not disputes and contests ad 
nauseam. I have my notions concerning Crossjay, Vernon 
has his. I should wish to make a gentleman of him. 
Vernon marks him for a sailor. But Vernon is the lad’s 


82 


THE EGOIST 


protector, I am not. Vernon took him from his father to 
instruct him, and he has a right to say what shall be done 
with him. I do not interfere. Only I can’t prevent the lad 
from liking me. Old Vernon seems to feel it. I assure you 
I hold entirely aloof. If I am asked, in spite of my dis¬ 
approval of Vernon’s plans for the boy, to subscribe to his 
departure, I can but shrug, because, as you see, I have never 
opposed. Old Vernon pays for him, he is the master, he 
decides, and if Crossjay is blown from the mast-head in a 
gale, the blame does not fall on me. These, my dear, are 
matters of reason.” 

“I would not venture to intrude on them,” said Clara, 
“if I had not suspected that money ...” 

“Yes,” cried Willoughby; “and it is a part. And let 
old Vernon surrender the boy to me, I will immediately 
relieve him of the burden on his purse. Can I do that, my 
dear, for the furtherance of a scheme I condemn ? The 
point is this: latterly I have invited Captain Patterne to 
visit me: just previous to his departure for the African 
Coast, where Government despatches Marines when there is 
no other way of killing them, I sent him a special invita¬ 
tion. He thanked me and curtly declined. The man, I 
may almost say, is my pensioner. Well, he calls himself 
a Patterne, he is undoubtedly a man of courage, he has 
elements of our blood, and the name. I think I am to be 
approved for desiring to make a better gentleman of the son 
than I behold in the father: and seeing that life from an 
early age on board ship has anything but made a gentleman 
of the father, I hold that I am right in shaping another 
course for the son.” 

“ Naval officers ...” Clara suggested. 

“Some,” said Willoughby. “But they must be men of 
birth, coming out of homes of good breeding. Strip them of 
the halo of the title of naval officers, and I fear you would 
not often say gentlemen when they step into a drawing¬ 
room. I went so far as to fancy I had some claim to make 
young Crossjay something different. It can be done * the 
Patterne comes out in his behaviour to you, my love : it can 
be done. But if I take him, I claim undisputed sway over 
him. I cannot, make a gentleman of the fellow if I am to 
compete with this person and that. In fine, he must look 
up to me, he must have one model.^. 


CLARA AND L^ETITIA MEET 


83 


“ Would you, then, provide for him subsequently ?” 

“ According to his behaviour.” 

“ Would not that be precarious for him ? ” 

“ More so than the profession you appear inclined to 
choose for him?” 

“ But there he would be under clear regulations.” 

“ With me he would have to respond to affection.” 

“ Would you secure to him a settled income ? For an idle 
gentleman is bad enough; a penniless gentleman ! . . .” 

“ He has only to please me, my dear, and he will be 
launched and protected.” 

“ But if he does not succeed in pleasing you! ” 

“Is it so difficult ?” 

“ Oh! ” Clara fretted. 

“ You see, my love, I answer you,” said Sir Willoughby. 

He resumed: “ But let old Vernon have his trial with the 
lad. He has his own ideas. Let him carry them out. I 
shall watch the experiment.” 

Clara was for abandoning her task in sheer faintness. 

“Is not the question one of money?” she said shyly, 
knowing Mr. Whitford to be poor. 

“ Old Vernon chooses to spend his money that way,” 
replied Sir Willoughby. “If it saves him from breaking 
his shins and risking his neck on his Alps, we may consider 
it well employed.” 

“Yes,” Clara’s voice occupied a pause. 

She seized her languor as it were a curling snake and cast 
it off. “ But I understand that Mr. Whitford wants your 
assistance. Is he not — not rich? When he leaves the 
Hall to try his fortune in literature in London, he may not 
be so well able to support Crossjay and obtain the instruc¬ 
tion necessary for the boy: and it would be generous to 
help him.” 

“ Leaves the Hall! ” exclaimed Willoughby. “ I have not 
heard a word of it. He made a bad start at the beginning, 
and I should have thought that would have tamed him: had 
to throw over his Fellowship; ahem. Then he received a 
small legacy some time back, and wanted to be off to push 
his luck in Literature : rank gambling, as I told him. Lon- 
donizing can do him no good. I thought that nonsense of 
his was over years ago. What is it he has from me ? — 


84 


THE EGOIST 


* 

about a hundred and fifty a year : and it might be doubled 
for the asking : and all the books he requires : and these 
writers and scholars no sooner think of a book than they 
must have it. And do not suppose me to complain. I am 
a man who will not have a single shilling expended by those 
who serve immediately about my person. I confess to 
exacting that kind of dependancy. Feudalism is not an 
objectionable thing if you can be sure of the lord. You 
know, Clara, and you should know me in my weakness too, 
I do not claim servitude, I stipulate for affection. I claim 
to be surrounded by persons loving me. And with one ? 
. . . dearest! So that we two can shut out the world: 
we live what is the dream of others. Nothing imaginable 
^an be sweeter. It is a veritable heaven on earth. To be 
the possessor of the whole of you ! Your thoughts, hopes, 
all.” 

Sir Willoughby intensified his imagination to conceive 
more : he could not, or could not express it, and pursued: 
“But what is this talk of Vernon’s leaving me ? He can¬ 
not leave. He has barely a hundred a year of his own. 
You see, I consider him. I do not speak of the ingratitude 
of the wish to leave. You know, my dear, I have a deadly 
abhorrence of partings and such like. As far as I can, I 
surround myself with healthy people specially to guard my¬ 
self from having my feelings wrung; and excepting Miss 
Dale, whom you like — my darling does like her?”—the 
answer satisfied him; “with that one exception, I am not 
aware of a case that threatens to torment me. And here is 
a man, under no compulsion, talking of leaving the Hall! 
In the name of goodness, why ? But why ? Am I to 
imagine that the sight of perfect felicity distresses him ? 
We are told that the world is ‘desperately wicked.’ I do 
not like to think it of my friends ; yet otherwise their con¬ 
duct is often hard to account for.” 

“ If it were true, you would not punish Cross jay ? ” Clara 
feebly interposed. 

“I should certainly take Crossjay and make a man of him 
after my own model, my dear. But who spoke to you of 
this ? ” 

“ Mr. Whitford himself. And let me give you my opinion, 
Willoughby, that he will take Crossjay with him rather than 


CLARA AND LiETITIA MEET 


85 


leave him, if there is a fear of the boy’s missing his chance 
of the navy.” 

“ Marines appear to be in the ascendant,” said Sir Wil¬ 
loughby, astonished at the locution and pleading in the 
interests of a son of one. “ Then Crossjay he must take. 
I cannot accept half the boy. I am,” he laughed, “ the legiti¬ 
mate claimant in the application for judgement before the 
wise King. Besides, the boy has a dose of my blood in him; 
he has none of Vernon’s, not one drop.” 

“Ah!” 

“ You see, my love.” 

“ Oh! I do see; yes.” 

“ I put forth no pretensions to perfection,” Sir Willoughby 
continued. “I can bear a considerable amount of provoca¬ 
tion ; still I can be offended, and I am unforgiving when I 
have been offended. Speak to Vernon, if a natural occasion 
should spring up. I shall, of course, have to speak to him. 
You may, Clara, have observed a man who passed me on 
the road as we were cantering home, without a hint of a 
touch to his hat That man is a tenant of mine, farming 
six hundred acres, Hoppner by name: a man bound to 
remember that I have, independently of my position, obliged 
him frequently. His lease of my ground has five years to 
run. I must say I detest the churlishness of our country 
population, and where it comes across me I chastise it. 
Vernon is a different matter: he will only require to be 
spoken to. One would fancy the old fellow laboured now 
and then under a magnetic attraction to beggary. My love,” 
he bent to her and checked their pacing up and down, “ you 
are tired ? ” 

“ I am very tired to-day,” said Clara. 

His arm was offered. She laid two fingers on it, and they 
dropped when he attempted to press them to his rib. 

He did not insist. To walk beside her was to share in 
the stateliness of her walking. 

He placed himself at a corner of the doorway for her to 
pass him into the house, and doated on her cheek, her ear, 
and the softly dusky nape of her neck, where this way and 
that the little lighter-coloured irreclaimable curls running 
truant from the comb and the knot — curls, half-curls, root- 
curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgeling feathers, tufts 


86 


THE EGOIST 


of down, blown wisps — waved or fell, waved over or up or 
involutedly, or strayed, loose and downward, in the form of 
small silken paws, hardly any of them much thicker than a 
crayon shading, cunninger than long round locks of gold to 
trick the heart. 

Laetitia ‘had nothing to show resembling such beauty. 


CHAPTER X 

IN WHICH SIR WILLOUGHBY CHANCES TO SUPPLY THE TITLE 
FOR HIMSELF 

Xow Vernon was useful to his cousin; he was the ac¬ 
complished secretary of a man who governed his estates 
shrewdly and diligently, but had been once or twice unlucky 
in his judgements pronounced from the magisterial bench 
as a Justice of the Peace, on which occasions a half-column 
of trenchant English supported by an apposite classical 
quotation impressed Sir Willoughby with the value of such 
a secretary in a controversy. He had no fear of that fiery 
dragon of scorching breath — the newspaper Press —while 
Vernon was his right-hand man; and as he intended to enter 
Parliament, he foresaw the greater need of him. Further¬ 
more, he liked his cousin to date his own controversial 
writings, on classical subjects, from Patterne Hall. It 
caused his house to shine in a foreign field; proved the 
service of scholarship by giving it a flavour of a bookish 
aristocracy that, though not so well worth having, and 
indeed in itself contemptible, is above the material and 
titular; one cannot quite say how. There, however, is the 
flavour. Dainty sauces are the life, the nobility, of famous 
dishes; taken alone, the former would be nauseating, the 
latter plebeian. It is thus, or somewhat so, when you have 
a poet, still better a scholar, attached to your household. 
Sir Willoughby deserved to have him, for he was above his 
county friends in his apprehension of the flavour bestowed 
by the man; and having him, he had made them conscious 
of their deficiency. His cook, M. Dehors, pupil of the great 



TITLE FOR SIR WILLOUGHBY SUPPLIED 87 

Godefroy, was not the only French cook in the county; but 
his cousin and secretary, the rising scholar, the elegant 
essayist, was an unparalleled decoration; of his kind, of 
course. Personally, we laugh at him; you had better not, 
unless you are fain to show that the higher world of polite 
literature is unknown to you. Sir Willoughby could create 
an abject silence at a county dinner-table, by an allusion 
to Vernon “at work at home upon his Etruscans or his 
Dorians ; ” and he paused a moment to let the allusion sink, 
laughed audibly to himself over his eccentric cousin, and 
let him rest. 

In addition, Sir Willoughby abhorred the loss of a famih 
iar face in his domestic circle. He thought ill of servants 
who could accept their dismissal without petitioning to stay 
with him. A servant that gave warning partook of a cer¬ 
tain fiendishness. Vernon’s project of leaving the Hall 
offended and alarmed the sensitive gentleman. “I shall 
have to hand Letty Dale to him at last! ” he thought,yield¬ 
ing in bitter generosity to the conditions imposed on him 
by the ungenerousness of another. For, since his engage¬ 
ment to Miss Middleton, his electrically forethoughtful 
mind had seen in Miss Dale, if she stayed in the neighbour¬ 
hood, and remained unmarried, the governess of his infant 
children, often consulting with him. But here was a pros¬ 
pect dashed out. The two, then, may marry, and live in a 
cottage on the borders of his park ; and Vernon can retain 
his post, and Laetitia her devotion. The risk of her casting 
it off had to be faced. Marriage has been known to have 
such an effect on the most faithful of women, that a great 
passion fades to naught in their volatile bosoms when they 
have taken a husband. We see in women especially the 
triumph of the animal over the spiritual. Nevertheless, 
risks must be run for a purpose in view. 

Having no taste for a discussion with Vernon, whom it 
was his habit to confound by breaking away from him 
abruptly when he had delivered his opinion, he left it to 
both the persons interesting themselves in young Crossjay 
to imagine that he was meditating on the question of the 
lad, and to imagine that it would be wise to leave him to 
meditate ; for he could be preternaturally acute in reading 
any of his fellow^creatures if they crossed the current of 


88 


THE EGOIST 


his feelings. And, meanwhile, he instructed the ladies 
Eleanor and Isabel to bring Lsetitia Dale on a visit to the 
Hall, where dinner-parties were soon to be given and a 
pleasing talker would be wanted; where also a woman of 
intellect, steeped in a splendid sentiment, hitherto a miracle 
of female constancy, might stir a younger woman to some 
emulation. Definitely to resolve to bestow Laetitia upon 
Vernon, was more than he could do; enough that he held 
the card. 

Regarding Clara, his genius for perusing the heart which 
was not in perfect harmony with him through the series of 
responsive movements to his own, informed him of a some¬ 
thing in her character that might have suggested to Mrs. 
Mountstuart Jenkinson her indefensible, absurd “ rogue in 
porcelain.” Idea there was none in that phrase; yet, if 
you looked on Clara as a delicately inimitable porcelain 
beauty, the suspicion of a delicately inimitable ripple over 
her features touched a thought of innocent roguery, wild- 
wood roguery ; the likeness to the costly and lovely sub¬ 
stance appeared to admit a fitness in the dubious epithet. 
He detested but was haunted by the phrase. 

She certainly had at times the look of the nymph that 
has gazed too long on the faun, and has unwittingly copied 
his lurking lip and long sliding eye. Her play with young 
Crossjay resembled a return of the lady to the cat; she 
flung herself into it as if her real vitality had been in sus¬ 
pense till she saw the boy. Sir Willoughby by no means 
disapproved of a physical liveliness that promised him 
health in his mate; but he began to feel in their conver¬ 
sations that she did not sufficiently think of making herself 
a nest for him. Steely points were opposed to him when 
he, figuratively, bared his bosom to be taken to the softest 
and fairest. She reasoned: in other words, armed her 
ignorance. She reasoned against him publicly, and lured 
Vernon to support her. Influence is to be counted for 
power, and her influence over Vernon was displayed in her 
persuading him to dance one evening at Lady Culmer’s, 
after his melancholy exhibitions of himself in the art; and 
not only did she persuade him to stand up fronting her, she 
manoeuvred him through the dance like a clever boy cajol¬ 
ing a top to come to him without reeling, both to Vernon’s 


TITLE FOB SIB WILLOUGHBY SUPPLIED 


89 


contentment and to Sir Willoughby’s ; for he was the last 
man to object to a manifestation of power in his bride. 
Considering her influence with Vernon, he renewed the dis¬ 
course upon young Crossjay; and, as he was addicted to 
system, he took her into his confidence, that she might be 
taught to look to him and act for him. 

“ Old Vernon has not spoken to you again of that lad ? ” 
he said. 

“ Yes, Mr. Whitford has asked me.” 

“ He does not ask me, my dear I ” 

“He may fancy me of greater aid than I am.” 

“You see, my love, if he puts Crossjay on me, he will be 
off. He has this craze for ‘ enlisting ’ his pen in London, 
as he calls it; and I am accustomed to him ; I don’t like 
to think of him as a hack scribe, writing nonsense from 
dictation to earn a pitiful subsistence; I want him here; 
and, supposing he goes, he offends me; he loses a friend; 
and it will not be the first time that a friend has tried me 
too far; but, if he offends me, he is extinct.” 

“ Is what ? ” cried Clara, with a look of fright. 

“ He becomes to me at once as if he had never been. He 
is extinct.” 

“ In spite of your affection ? ” 

“ On account of it, I might say. Our nature is mysteri¬ 
ous, and mine as much so as any. Whatever my regrets, 
he goes out. This is not a language I talk to the world. 
I do the man no harm; I am not to be named unchristian. 
But! . . .” 

Sir Willoughby mildly shrugged, and indicated a spread¬ 
ing out of the arms. 

“But do, do talk to me as you talk to the world, 
Willoughby; give me some relief! ” 

“ My own Clara, we are one. You should know me, at 
my worst, we will say, if you like, as well as at my best.” 

“ Should I speak too ? ” 

“ What could you have to confess ? ” 

She hung silent: the wave of an insane resolution 
swelled in her bosom and subsided before she said, 
“Cowardice, incapacity to speak.” 

‘Women!” said he. 

We do not expect so much of women; the heroic virtues 


90 


THE EGOIST 


as little as the vices. They have not to unfold the scroll of 
character. 

He resumed, and by his tone she understood that she was 
now in the inner temple of him : “ I tell you these things; 
I quite acknowledge they do not elevate me. They help to 
constitute my character. I tell you most humbly that I have 
in me much too much of the fallen archangel’s pride.” 

Clara bowed her head over a sustained indrawn breath. 

“ It must be pride,” he said, in a revery superinduced by 
her thoughtfulness over the revelation, and glorying in the 
black flames demoniacal wherewith he crowned himself. 

“ Can you not correct it ? ” said she. 

He replied, profoundly vexed by disappointment: “ I am 
what I am. It might be demonstrated to you mathemati¬ 
cally that it is corrected by equivalents or substitutions in 
my character. If it be a failing — assuming that.” 

“ It seems one to me: so cruelly to punish Mr. Whitford 
for seeking to improve his fortunes.” 

“ He reflects on my share in his fortunes. He has had 
but to apply to me, for his honorarium to be doubled.” 

“ He wishes for independence.” 

“ Independence of me / ” 

“ Liberty! ” 

“ At my expense! ” 

“Oh, Willoughby.” 

“ Ay, but this is the world, and I know it, my love; and 
beautiful as your incredulity may be, you will find it more 
comforting to confide in my knowledge of the selfishness of 
the world. My sweetest, you will ? — you do! For a breath 
of difference between us is intolerable. Do you not feel 
how it breaks our magic ring ? One small fissure, and we 
have the world with its muddy deluge!—But my subject 
was old Vernon. Yes, I pay for Crossjay, if Vernon con¬ 
sents to stay. I waive my own scheme for the lad, though 
I think it the better one. How, then, to induce Vernon to 
stay. He has his ideas about staying under a mistress of 
the household; and therefore, not to contest it — he is a 
man of no argument; a sort of lunatic determination takes 
the place of it with old Vernon!—let him settle close by 
me, in one of my cottages; very well, and to settle him we 
must marry him.” 


TITLE FOR SIR WILLOUGHBY SUPPLIED 91 

“ Who is there ? ” said Clara, beating for the lady in her 
mind. 

“ Women,” said Willoughby, “ are born match-makers, and 
the most persuasive is a young bride. With a man — and a 
man like old Yernon ! — she is irresistible. It is my wish, 
and that arms you. It is your wish, that subjugates him. 
If he goes, he goes for good. If he stays, he is my friend. 
I deal simply with him, as with every one. It is the secret 
of authority. Now Miss Dale will soon lose her father. 
He exists on a pension ; she has the prospect of having to 
leave the neighbourhood of the Hall, unless she is established 
near us. Her whole heart is in this region; it is the poor 
soul’s passion. Count on her agreeing. But she will require 
a little wooing: and old Yernon wooing ! Picture the scene 
to yourself, my love. His notion of wooing, I suspect, will 
be to treat the lady like a lexicon, and turn over the leaves 
for the word, and fly through the leaves for another word, 
and so get a sentence. Don’t frown at the poor old fellow, 
my Clara; some have the language on their tongues, and 
some have not. Some are very dry sticks ; manly men, 
honest fellows, but so cut away, so polished away from the 
sex, that they are in absolute want of outsiders to supply the 
silken filaments to attach them. Actually! ” Sir Willoughby 
laughed in Clara’s face to relax the dreamy stoniness of her 
look. “ But I can assure you, my dearest, I have seen it. 
Yernon does not know how to speak — as we speak. He has, 
or he had, what is called a sneaking affection for Miss Dale. 
It was the most amusing thing possible : his courtship ! — 
the air of a dog with an uneasy conscience, trying to recon¬ 
cile himself with his master! We were all in fits of laughter. 
Of course it came to nothing.” 

“ Will Mr. Whitford,” said Clara, “ offend you to extinc¬ 
tion if he declines ? ” 

Willoughby breathed an affectionate “Tush,” to her 
silliness. 

“We bring them together, as we best can. You see, 
Clara, I desire, and I will make some sacrifices to detain 
him.” 

“ But what do you sacrifice ? — a cottage ? ” said Clara, 
combative at all points. 

“An ideal, perhaps. I lay no stress on sacrifice. I 


92 


THE EGOIST 


strongly object to separations. And therefore, you will say, 
I prepare the ground for unions ? Put your influence to 
good service, my love. I believe you could persuade him to 
give us the Highland fling on the drawing-room table.” 

“ There is nothing to say to him of Cross jay ? ” 

“ We hold Crossjay in reserve.” 

“ It is urgent.” 

“ Trust me. I have my ideas. I am not idle. That boy 
bids fair for a capital horseman. Eventualities might...” 
Sir Willoughby murmured to himself, and addressing his 
bride : “ The cavalry ? If we put him into the cavalry, we 
might make a gentleman of him — not be ashamed of him. 
Or, under certain eventualities, the Guards. Think it over, 
my love. De Craye, who will, I assume, act best man for 
me, supposing old Vernon to pull at the collar, is a Lieu¬ 
tenant-Colonel in the Guards, a thorough gentleman — of the 
brainless class, if you like, but an elegant fellow ; an Irish¬ 
man ; you will see him, and I should like to set a naval 
lieutenant beside him in a drawing-room, for you to compare 
them and consider the model you would choose for a boy you 
are interested in. Horace is grace and gallantry incarnate ; 
fatuous, probably: I have always been too friendly with 
him to examine closely. He made himself one of my dogs, 
though my elder, and seemed to like to be at my heels. 
One of the few men’s faces I can call admirably handsome ; 
— with nothing behind it, perhaps. As Vernon says, ‘ a 
nothing picked by the vultures and bleached by the desert.’ 
Hot a bad talker, if you are satisfied with keeping up the 
ball. He will amuse you. Old Horace does not know how 
amusing he is ! ” 

“ Did Mr. Whitford say that of Colonel De Craye ? ” 

“ I forget the person of whom he said it. So you have 
noticed old Vernon’s foible ? Quote him one of his epigrams, 
and he is in motion head and heels! It is an infallible 
receipt for tuning him. If I want to have him in good 
temper, I have only to remark, ‘ as you said.’ I straighten 
his back instantly.” 

11 1,” said Clara, “ have noticed chiefly his anxiety con¬ 
cerning the boy; for which I admire him.” 

“ Creditable, if not particularly far-sighted and sagacious. 
Well then, my dear, attack him at once: lead him to the 


TITLE FOR SIR WILLOUGHBY SUPPLIED 


93 


subject of our fair neighbour. She is to be our guest for a 
week or so, and the whole affair might be concluded far 
enough to fix him before she leaves. She is at present 
awaiting the arrival of a cousin to attend on her father. A 
little gentle pushing will precipitate old Vernon on his 
knees as far as he ever can unbend them ; but when a lady 
is made ready to expect a declaration, you know, why, she 
does not — does she ? — demand the entire formula ? — 
though some beautiful fortresses . . . ” 

He enfolded her. Clara was growing hardened to it. To 
this she was fated; and not seeing any way of escape, she 
invoked a friendly frost to strike her blood, and passed 
through the minute unfeelingly. Having passed it, she 
reproached herself for making so much of it, thinking it a 
lesser endurance than to listen to him. What could she 
do ? — she was caged; by her word of honour, as she at one 
time thought; by her cowardice, at another; and dimly 
sensible that the latter was a stronger lock than the former, 
she mused on the abstract question whether a woman’s 
cowardice can be so absolute as to cast her into the jaws of 
her aversion. Is it to be conceived ? Is there not a moment 
when it stands at bay ? But haggard-visaged Honour then 
starts up claiming to be dealt with in turn; for having cour¬ 
age restored to her, she must have the courage to break 
with honour, she must dare to be faithless, and not merely 
say, I will be brave, but be brave enough to be dishonour¬ 
able. The cage of a plighted woman hungering for her dis¬ 
engagement has two keepers, a noble and a vile; where on 
earth is creature so dreadfully enclosed ? It lies with her 
to overcome what degrades her, that she may win to liberty 
by overcoming what exalts. 

Contemplating her situation, this idea (or vapour of youth 
taking the godlike semblance of an idea) sprang, born of her 
present sickness, in Clara’s mind ; that it must be an ill- 
constructed tumbling world where the hour of ignorance is 
made the creator of our destiny by being forced to the de¬ 
cisive elections upon which life’s main issues hang. Her 
teacher had brought her to contemplate his view of the 
world. 

She thought likewise : how must a man despise women, 
who can expose himself as he does to me I 


94 


TUB EGOIST 


Miss Middleton owed it to Sir Willoughby Patterne that 
she ceased to think like a girl. When had the great change 
begun ? Glancing back, she could imagine that it was near 
the period we call, in love, the first — almost from the first. 
And she was led to imagine it through having become barred 
from imagining her own emotions of that season. They were 
so dead as not to arise even under the forms of shadows in 
fancy. Without imputing blame to him, for she was reason¬ 
able so far, she deemed herself a person entrapped. In a 
dream somehow she had committed herself to a life-long 
imprisonment; and, oh terror ! not in a quiet dungeon; the 
barren walls closed round her, talked, called for ardour, 
expected admiration. 

She was unable to say why she could not give it; why 
she retreated more and more inwardly; why she invoked the 
frost to kill her tenderest feelings. She was in revolt, until 
a whisper of the day of bells reduced her to blank submis¬ 
sion ; out of which a breath of peace drew her to revolt again 
in gradual rapid stages, and once more the aspect of that 
singular day of merry blackness felled her to earth. It 
was alive, it advanced, it had a mouth, it had a song. She 
received letters of bridesmaids writing of it, and felt them 
as waves that hurl a log of wreck to shore. Following 
which afflicting sense of antagonism to the whole circle 
sweeping on with her, she considered the possibility of her 
being in a commencement of madness. Otherwise might 
she not be accused of a capriciousness quite as deplorable 
to consider ? She had written to certain of those young 
ladies not very long since of this gentleman — how ? — in 
what tone ? And was it her madness then ? — her recovery 
now ? It seemed to her that to have written of him enthu¬ 
siastically resembled madness more than to shudder away 
from the union ; but standing alone, opposing all she has 
consented to set in motion, is too strange to a girl for per¬ 
fect justification to be found in reason when she seeks it. 

Sir Willoughby was destined himself to supply her with 
that key of special insight which revealed and stamped 
him in a title to fortify her spirit of revolt, consecrate it 
almost. 

The popular physician of the county and famous anecdotal 
wit, Dr. Corney, had been a guest at dinner overnight, and 


TITLE FOR SIR WILLOUGHBY SUPPLIED 


95 


the next day there was talk of him, and of the resources of 
his art displayed by Armand Dehors on his hearing that he 
was to minister to the tastes of a gathering of hommes 
d’esprit. Sir Willoughby glanced at Dehors with his cus¬ 
tomary benevolent irony in speaking of the persons, great in 
their way, who served him. “ Why he cannot give us daily 
so good a dinner, one must, I suppose, go to French nature to 
learn. The French are in the habit of making up for all 
their deficiencies with enthusiasm. They have no reverence; 
if I had said to him, ‘ I want something particularly excel¬ 
lent, Dehors/ I should have had a commonplace dinner. But 
they have enthusiasm on draught, and that is what we must 
pull at. Know one Frenchman and you know France. I 
have had Dehors under my eye two years, and I can mount 
his enthusiasm at a word. He took hommes d’esprit to 
denote men of letters. Frenchmen have destroyed their 
nobility, so, for the sake of excitement, they put up the 
literary man — not to worship him ; that they can’t do; it’s 
to put themselves in a state of effervescence. They will not 
have real greatness above them, so they have sham. That 
they may justly call it equality, perhaps ! Ay, for all your 
shake of the head, my good Vernon! You see, human nature 
comes round again, try as we may to upset it, and the French 
only differ from us in wading through blood to discover that 
they are at their old trick once more : ‘ I am your equal, sir, 
your born equal. Oh! you are a man of letters ? Allow me 
to be in a bubble about you.’ Yes, Vernon, and I believe the 
fellow looks up to you as the head of the establishment. I 
am not jealous. Provided he attends to his functions ! 
There’s a French philosopher who’s for naming the days 
of the year after the birthdays of French men of letters, 
Voltaire-day, Rousseau-day, Racine-day, so on. Perhaps 
Vernon will inform us who takes April 1st.” 

“A few trifling errors are of no consequence when you 
are in the vein of satire,” said Vernon. “ Be satisfied with 
knowing a nation in the person of a cook.” 

“ They may be reading us English off in a jockey ! ” said 
Dr. Middleton. “ I believe that jockeys are the exchange 
we make for cooks ; and our neighbours do not get the best 
of the bargain.” 

“No, but, my dear good Vernon, it’s nonsensical,” said 


96 


THE EGOIST 


Sir Willoughby ; “ why be bawling every day the name of 
men of letters ? ” 

M Philosophers.” 

“ Well, philosophers.” 

“ Of all countries and times. And they are the bene¬ 
factors of humanity.” 

“ Bene . . . ! ” Sir Willoughby’s derisive laugh broke 
the word. “ There’s a pretension in all that, irreconcilable 
with English sound sense. Surely you see it ?” 

“We might,” said Vernon, “if you like, give alternative 
titles to the days, or have alternating days, devoted to our 
great families that performed meritorious deeds upon such 
a day.” 

The rebel Clara, delighting in his banter, was heard: 
“ Can we furnish sufficient ? ” 

“ A poet or two could help us.” 

“ Perhaps a statesman,” she suggested. 

“ A pugilist, if wanted.” 

“ For blowy days,” observed Dr. Middleton, and hastily 
in penitence picked up the conversation he had unintention¬ 
ally prostrated, with a general remark on new-fangled 
notions, and a word aside to Vernon; which created the 
olissful suspicion in Clara, that her father was indisposed 
to second Sir Willoughby’s opinions even when sharing 
them. 

Sir Willoughby had led the conversation. Displeased 
that the lead should be withdrawn from him, he turned to 
Clara and related one of the after-dinner anecdotes of Dr. 
Corney ; and another, with a vast deal of human nature 
in it, concerning a valetudinarian gentleman, whose wife 
chanced to be desperately ill, and he went to the physicians 
assembled in consultation outside the sick-room, imploring 
them by all he valued, and in tears, to save the poor patient 
for him, saying: “She is everything to me, everything, and 
if she dies I am compelled to run the risks of marrying 
again ; I must marry again ; for she has accustomed me so 
to the little attentions of a wife, that in truth I can’t, I can’t 
lose her ! She must be saved ! ” And the loving husband 
of any devoted wife wrung his hands. 

“ Now, there, Clara, there you have the Egoist,” added 
Sir Willoughby. “That is the perfect Egoist. You see 


TITLE FOR SIR WILLOUGHBY SUPPLIED 


97 


what he comes to — and his wife ! The man was utterly 
unconscious of giving vent to the grossest selfishness.” 

“ An Egoist! ” said Clara. 

“ Beware of marrying an Egoist, my dear ! ” He bowed 
gallantly; and so blindly fatuous did he appear to her, that 
she could hardly believe him guilty of uttering the words 
she had heard from him, and kept her eyes on him vacantly 
till she came to a sudden full stop in the thoughts directing 
her gaze. She looked at Vernon, she looked at her father, 
and at the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. None of them saw 
the man in the word, none noticed the word; yet this word 
was her medical herb, her illuminating lamp, the key of him 
(and, alas, but she thought it by feeling her need of one), 
the advocate pleading in apology for her. Egoist! She 
beheld him — unfortunate, self-designated man that he was ! 
— in his good qualities as well as bad under the implacable 
lamp, and his good were drenched in his first person singu¬ 
lar. His generosity roared of I louder than the rest. Con¬ 
ceive him at the age of Dr. Corney’s hero : “ Pray, save my 
wife for me. I shall positively have to get another if Hose 
her, and one who may not love me half so well, or under¬ 
stand the peculiarities of my character and appreciate my 
attitudes.’’ He was in his thirty-second year, therefore a 
young man, strong and healthy, yet his garrulous return to 
liis principal theme, his emphasis on I and me, lent him the 
seeming of an old man spotted with decaying youth. 

“ Beware of marrying an Egoist.” 

Would he help her to escape ? The idea of the scene 
ensuing upon her petition for release, and the being 
dragged round the walls of his egoism, and having her 
head knocked against the corners, alarmed her with sen¬ 
sations of sickness. 

There was the example of Constantia. But that desper¬ 
ate young lady had been assisted by a gallant, loving gen¬ 
tleman; she had met a Captain Oxford. 

Clara brooded on those two until they seemed heroic. 
She questioned herself: Could she . . . ? were one to 
come ? She shut her eyes in languor, leaning the wrong 
way of her wishes, yet unable to say No. 

Sir Willoughby had positively said beware! Marrying 
him would be a deed committed in spite of his express 


98 


THE EGOIST 


warning. She went so far as to conceive him subsequently 
saying, i4 I warned you.” She conceived the state of mar¬ 
riage with him as that of a woman tied not to a man of 
heart, but to an obelisk lettered all over with hieroglyphics, 
and everlastingly hearing him expound them, relishingly 
renewing his lectures on them. 

Full surely this immovable stone-man would not release 
her. This petrifaction of egoism would from amazedly to 
austerely refuse the petition. His pride would debar him 
from understanding her desire to be released. And if she 
resolved on it, without doing it straightway in Constantia’s 
manner, the miserable bewilderment of her father, for 
whom such a complication would be a tragic dilemma, had 
to be thought of. Her father, with all his tenderness for 
his child, would make a stand on a point of honour; 
though certain to yield to her, he would be distressed, in a 
tempest of worry; and Dr. Middleton thus afflicted threw 
up his arms, he shunned books, shunned speech, and re¬ 
sembled a castaway on the ocean, with nothing between 
himself and his calamity. As for the world it would be 
barking at her heels. She might call the man she wrenched 
her hand from, Egoist; jilt, the world would call her. 
She dwelt bitterly on her agreement with Sir Willoughby 
regarding the world, laying it to his charge that her 
garden had become a place of nettles, her horizon an un¬ 
lighted fourth side of a square. 

Clara passed from person to person visiting the Hall. 
There was universal, and as she was compelled to see, 
honest admiration of the host. Not a soul had a suspicion 
of his cloaked nature. Her agony of hypocrisy in accept¬ 
ing their compliments as the bride of Sir Willoughby 
Patterne was poorly moderated by contempt of them for 
their infatuation. She tried to cheat herself with the 
thought that they were right and that she was the foolish 
and wicked inconstant. In her anxiety to strangle the 
rebelliousness which had been communicated from her 
mind to her blood, and was present with her whether her 
mind was in action or not, she encouraged the ladies 
Eleanor and Isabel to magnify the fictitious man of their 
idolatry, hoping that she might enter into them imagi¬ 
natively, that she might to some degree subdue herself 


TITLE FOR SIR WILLOUGHBY SUPPLIED 99 

to the necessity of her position. If she partly succeeded 
in stupefying her antagonism, live minutes of him undid 
the work. 

He requested her to wear the Patterne Pearls for a 
dinner-party of grand ladies, telling her that he would 
commission Miss Isabel to take them to her. Clara begged 
leave to decline them, on the plea of having no right to 
wear them. He laughed at her modish modesty. “But 
really it might almost be classed with affectation,” said 
he. “I give you the right. Virtually you are my wife.” 

“No.” 

“ Before heaven ? ” 

“No. We are not married.” 

“ As my betrothed, will you wear them, to please me ? ” 

“I would rather not. I cannot wear borrowed jewels. 
These I cannot wear. Forgive me, I cannot. And, Wil¬ 
loughby,” she said, scorning herself for want of fortitude 
in not keeping to the simply blunt provocative refusal, 
“ does one not look like a victim decked for the sacrifice 
— the garlanded heifer you see on Greek vases, in that 
array of jewelry ? ” 

“My dear Clara! ” exclaimed the astonished lover, “how 
can you term them borrowed, when they are the Patterne 
jewels, our family heirloom pearls, unmatched, I venture 
to affirm, decidedly in my county and many others, and 
passing to the use of the mistress of the house in the 
natural course of things ? ” 

“They are yours, they are not mine.” 

“Prospectively they are yours.” 

“It would be to anticipate the fact to wear them.” 

“With my consent, my approval ? at my request ?” 

“I am not yet . . . I never may be . . .” 

“ My wife ? ” He laughed triumphantly, and silenced 
her by manly smothering. 

Her scruple was perhaps an honourable one, he said. 
Perhaps the jewels were safer in their iron box. He 
had merely intended a surprise and gratification to her. 

Courage was coming to enable her to speak more 
plainly, when his discontinuing to insist on her wearing 
the jewels, under an appearance of deference to her wishes, 
disarmed her by touching her sympathies. 


100 


THE EGOIST 


She said, however, “I fear we do not often agree, Wil¬ 
loughby.” 

“When you are a little older!” was the irritating 
answer. 

“It would then be too late to make the discovery.” 

“The discovery, I apprehend, is not imperative, my 
love.” 

“It seems to me that our minds are opposed.” 

“I should,” said he, “have been awake to it at a single 
indication, be sure.” 

“But I know,” she pursued, “I have learnt, that the 
ideal of conduct for women is to subject their minds to 
the part of an accompaniment.” 

“ For women, my love ? my wife will be in natural 
harmony with me.” 

“Ah!” She compressed her lips. The yawn would 
come. “I am sleepier here than anywhere.” 

“Ours, my Clara, is the finest air of the kingdom. It 
has the effect of sea-air.” 

“ But if I am always asleep here ? ” 

“We shall have to make a public exhibition of the 
Beauty.” 

This dash of his liveliness defeated her. 

She left him, feeling the contempt of the brain fever¬ 
ishly quickened and fine-pointed, for the brain chewing 
the cud in the happy pastures of unawakenedness. So 
violent was the fever, so keen her introspection, that she 
spared few, and Vernon was not among them. Young 
Crossjay, whom she considered the least able of all to act 
as an ally, was the only one she courted with a real desire 
to please him; he was the one she affectionately envied; 
he was the youngest, the freest, he had the world before 
him, and he did not know how horrible the world was, or 
could be made to look. She loved the boy from expecting 
nothing of him. Others, Vernon Whitford, for instance, 
could help, and moved no hand. He read her case. A 
scrutiny so penetrating under its air of abstract thought¬ 
fulness, though his eyes did but rest on her a second or 
two, signified that he read her line by line, and to the end 
— excepting what she thought of him for probing her with 
that sharp steel of insight without a purpose. 


TITLE FOR SIR WILLOUGHBY SUPPLIED 101 


She knew her mind's injustice. It was her case, her 
lamentable case — the impatient panic-stricken nerves of a 
captured wild creature, which cried for help. She exag¬ 
gerated her sufferings to get strength to throw them off. 
and lost it in the recognition that they were exaggerated: 
and out of the conflict issued recklessness, with a cry as 
wild as any coming of madness; for she did not blush in 
saying to herself, “If some one loved me!” Before hear¬ 
ing of Constantia, she had mused upon liberty as a virgin 
Goddess, — men were out of her thoughts; even the figure 
of a rescuer, if one dawned in her mind, was more ange* 
than hero. That fair childish maidenliness had ceased. 
With her body straining in her dragon’s grasp, with the 
savour of loathing, unable to contend, unable to speak 
aloud, she began to speak to herself, and all the health 
of her nature made her outcry womanly, — “If I were 
loved! ” —not for the sake of love, but for free breathing; 
and her utterance of it was to ensure life and enduringness 
to the wish, as the yearning of a mother on a drowning 
ship is to get her infant to shore. “If some noble gentle¬ 
man could see me as I am and not disdain to aid me! Oh! 
to be caught up out of this prison of thorns and brambles. 
I cannot tear my own way out. I am a coward. My cry 
for help confesses that. A beckoning of a finger would 
change me, I believe. I could fly bleeding and through 
hootings to a comrade. Oh! a comrade. I do not want 
a lover. I should find another Egoist, not so bad, but 
enough to make me take a breath like death. I could 
follow a soldier, like poor Sally or Molly. He stakes his 
life for his country, and a woman may be proud of the 
worst of men who do that. Constantia met a soldier. 
Perhaps she prayed and her prayer was altered. She did 
ill. But, oh, how I love her for it! His name was Harry 
Oxford. Papa would call him her Perseus. She must 
have felt that there was no explaining what she suffered. 
She had only to act, to plunge. First she fixed her mind 
on Harry Oxford. To be able to speak his name and see 
him awaiting her, must have been relief, a reprieve. She 
did not waver, she cut the links, she signed herself over. 
O brave girl! what do you think of me? But I have 
no Harry Whitford, I am alone. Let anything be said 


102 


THE EGOIST 


against women; we must be very bad to have such bad 
things written of us: only, say this, that to ask them to 
sign themselves over by oath, and ceremony, because of 
an ignorant promise, to" the man they have been mistaken 
in, is . . . it is — ” the sudden consciousness that she 
had put another name for Oxford, struck her a buffet, 
drowning her in crimson. 


CHAPTER XI 

THE DOUBLE-BLOSSOM WILD CHERRY-TREE 

Sir Willoughby chose a moment when Clara was with 
him and he had a good retreat through folding-windows to 
the lawn, in case of cogency on the enemy’s part, to attack 
his cousin regarding the preposterous plot to upset the 
family by a scamper to London: “By the way, Vernon, 
what is this you ’ve been mumbling to everybody save me, 
about leaving us to pitch yourself into the stew-pot and be 
made broth of ? — London is no better, and you are fit for 
considerably better. Don’t, I beg you, continue to annoy 
me. Take a run abroad, if you are restless. Take two 
or three months, and join us as we are travelling home; 
and then think of settling, pray. Follow my example, if 
you like. You can have one of my cottages, or a place 
built for you. Anything to keep a man from destroying 
the sense of stability about one. In London, my dear old 
fellow, you lose your identity. What are you there ? 
I ask you, what ? One has the feeling of the house 
crumbling when a man is perpetually for shifting and 
cannot fix himself. Here you are known, you can study 
at your ease; up in London you are nobody; I tell you 
honestly, I feel it myself; a week of London literally 
drives me home to discover the individual where I left 
him. Be advised. You don’t mean to go.” 

“I have the intention,” said Vernon. 

“Why?” 

“I’ve mentioned it to you.” 



THE WILD CHERRY-TREE 


103 


“To my face ?” 

“ Over your shoulder, is generally the only chance you 
give me.” 

“You have not mentioned it to me, to my knowledge. 
As to the reason, I might hear a dozen of your reasons, 
and I should not understand one. It’s against your inter¬ 
ests and against my wishes. Come, friend, I am not the 
only one you distress. Why, Vernon, you yourself have 
said that the English would be very perfect Jews if they 
could manage to live on the patriarchal system. You said 
it, yes, you said it! — but I recollect it clearly. Oh! as 
for your double-meanings, you said the thing, and you 
jeered at the incapacity of English families to live together, 
on account of bad temper; and now you are the first to 
break up our union! I decidedly do not profess to be 
perfect Jew, but I do . . .” 

Sir Willoughby caught signs of a probably smiling com¬ 
merce between his bride and his cousin. He raised his 
face, appeared to be consulting his eyelids, and resolved 
to laugh: “Well, I own it, I do like the idea of living 
patriarchally.” He turned to Clara. “The Rev. Doctor 
one of us!” 

“ My father ? ” she said. 

“ Why not ? ” 

“Papa’s habits are those of a scholar.” 

“That you might not be separated from him, my dear.” 

Clara thanked Sir Willoughby for the kindness of 
thinking of her father, mentally analyzing the kindness, 
in which at least she found no unkindness, scarcely 
egoism, though she knew it to be there. 

“We might propose it,” said he. 

“ As a compliment ? ” 

“ If he would condescend to accept it as a compliment. 
These great scholars! . . . And if Vernon goes, our in¬ 
ducement for Dr. Middleton to stay . . . But it is too 
absurd for discussion. Oh, Vernon, about Master Cross¬ 
jay; I will see to it.” 

He was about to give Vernon his shoulder and step into 
the garden, when Clara said, “You will have Crossjay 
trained for the navy, Willoughby ? There is not a da;y 
to lose.” 


104 


THE EGOIST 


“Yes, yes; I will see to it. Depend on me for holding 
the young rascal in view.” 

He presented his hand to her to lead her over the step 
to the gravel, surprised to behold how flushed she was. 

She responded to the invitation by putting her hand 
forth from a bent elbow, with hesitating fingers. “It 
should not be postponed, Willoughby.” 

Her attitude suggested a stipulation before she touched 
him. 

“ It’s an affair of money, as you know, Willoughby,” said 
Vernon. “If I ’m in London, I can’t well provide for the 
boy for some time to come, or it’s not certain that I can.” 

“ Why on earth should you go! ” 

“ That’s another matter. I want you to take my place 
with him.” 

“In which case the circumstances are changed. I am 
responsible for him, and I have a right to bring him up 
according to my own prescription.” 

“We are likely to have one idle lout the more.” 

“I guarantee to make a gentleman of him.” 

“We have too many of your gentlemen already.” 

“You can’t have enough, my good Vernon.” 

“They ’re the national apology for indolence. Training 
a penniless boy to be one of them is nearly as bad as an 
education in a thieves’ den; he will be just as much at war 
with society, if not game for the police.” 

“Vernon, have you seen Crossjay’s father, the now Cap¬ 
tain of Marines ? I think you have.” 

“He’s a good man and a very gallant officer.” 

“And in spite of his qualities he’s a cub, and an old 
cub. He is a captain now, but he takes that rank very 
late, you will own. There you have what you call a good 
man, undoubtedly a gallant officer, neutralized by the 
fact that he is not a gentleman. Holding intercourse 
with him is out of the question. Ho wonder Government 
declines to advance him rapidly. Young Crossjay does 
not bear your name. He bears mine, and on that point 
alone I should have a voice in the settlement of his career. 
And I say emphatically that a drawing-room approval 
of a young man is the best certificate for his general 
chances in life. I know of a City of London merchant of 


THE WILD CHERRY-TREE 


105 


some sort, and I know a firm of lawyers, who will have 
none but University men in their office; at least, they 
have the preference.” 

“Crossjay has a bullet head, fit neither for the Univer¬ 
sity nor the drawing-room,” said Vernon; “equal to fight¬ 
ing and dying for you, and that’s all.” 

Sir Willoughby contented himself with replying, “The 
lad is a favourite of mine.” 

His anxiety to escape a rejoinder caused him to step 
into the garden, leaving Clara behind him. “ My love! ” 
said he, in apology as he turned to her. She could not 
look stern, but she had a look without a dimple to soften 
it, and her eyes shone. For she had wagered in her heart 
that the dialogue she provoked upon Crossjay would expose 
the Egoist. And there were other motives, wrapped up 
and intertwisted, unrecognizable, sufficient to strike her 
with worse than the flush of her self-knowledge of wicked¬ 
ness when she detained him to speak of Crossjay before 
Vernon. 

At last it had been seen that she was conscious of 
suffering in her association with this Egoist! Vernon 
stood for the world taken into her confidence. The world, 
then, would not think so ill of her, she thought hopefully, 
at the same time that she thought most evilly of herself. 
But self-accusations were for the day of reckoning; she 
would and must have the world with her, or the belief 
that it was coining to her, in the terrible struggle she fore¬ 
saw within her horizon of self, now her utter boundary. 
She needed it for the inevitable conflict. Little sacrifices 
of her honesty might be made. Considering how weak she 
was, how solitary, how dismally entangled, daily disgraced 
beyond the power of any veiling to conceal from her fiery 
sensations, a little hypocrisy was a poor girl’s natural 
weapon. She crushed her conscientious mind with the 
assurance that it was magnifying trifles: not entirely 
unaware that she was magnifying trifles: not entirely 
unaware that she was thereby preparing it for a convenient 
blindness in the presence of dread alternatives; but the 
pride of laying such stress on small sins gave her purity 
a blush of pleasure and overcame the inner warning. In 
truth she dared not think evilly of herself for long, sail- 


106 


THE EGOIST 


ing into battle as she was. Nuns and anchorites may; 
they have leisure. She regretted the forfeits she had to 
pay for self-assistance and, if it might be won, the world’s; 
regretted, felt the peril of the loss, and took them up and 
flung them. 

“You see, old Vernon has no argument,” Willoughby 
said to her. 

He drew her hand more securely on his arm, to make 
her sensible that she leaned on a pillar of strength. 

“Whenever the little brain is in doubt, perplexed, 
undecided which course to adopt, she will come to me, 
will she not? I shall always listen,” he resumed sooth¬ 
ingly. “ My own! and I to you when the world vexes me. 
So we round our completeness. You will know me; you 
will know me in good time. I am not a mystery to those 
to whom I unfold myself. I do not pretend to mystery: 
yet, I will confess, your home—your heart’s — Willoughby 
is not exactly identical with the Willoughby before the 
world. One must be armed against that rough beast.” 

Certain is the vengeance of the young upon monotony; 
nothing more certain. They do not scheme it, but sameness 
is a poison to their systems; and vengeance is their heartier 
breathing, their stretch of the limbs, run in the fields; 
nature avenges them. 

“When does Colonel De Craye arrive?” said Clara. 

“Horace ? In two or three days. You wish him to be 
on the spot to learn his part, my love ? ” 

She had not flown forward to the thought of Colonel De 
Craye’s arrival; she knew not why she had mentioned 
him; but now she flew back, shocked, first into shadowy 
subterfuge, and then into the criminal’s dock. 

“ I do not wish him to be here. I do not know that he 
has a part to learn. I have no wish. Willoughby, did 
you not say I should come to you and you would listen ? — 
will you listen ? I am so commonplace that I shall not be 
understood by you unless you take my words for the very 
meaning of the words. I am unworthy. I am volatile. 
I love my liberty. I want to be free • . 

* Flitch! ” he called. 

It sounded necromantic. 

“Pardon me, my love,” he said. “The man you sei 


THE WILD CHERRY-TREE 


107 


yonder violates my express injunction that lie is not to 
come on my grounds, and here I find him on the borders 
of my garden! ” 

Sir Willoughby waved his hand to the abject figure of a 
man standing to intercept him. 

“Volatile, unworthy, liberty — my dearest!” he bent to 
her when the man had appeased him by departing, “you 
are at liberty within the law, like all good women; I shall 
control and direct your volatility; and your sense of 
worthiness must be re-established when we are more 
intimate; it is timidity. The sense of unworthiness is a 
guarantee of worthiness ensuing. I believe I am in the 
vein of a sermon! Whose the fault ? The sight of that 
man was annoying. Flitch was a stable-boy, groom, and 
coachman, like his father before him, at the Hall thirty 
years; his father died in our service. Mr. Flitch had not 
a single grievance here; only one day the demon seizes him 
with the notion of bettering himself, he wants his inde¬ 
pendence, and he presents himself to me with a story of 
a shop in our county town. —Flitch! remember, if you 
go you go for good. — Oh! he quite comprehended. — Very 
well; good-bye, Flitch; — The man was respectful: he 
looked the fool he was very soon to turn out to be. Since 
then, within a period of several years, I have had him, 
against my express injunctions, ten times on my grounds. 
It ’s curious to calculate. Of course the shop failed, and 
Flitch’s independence consists in walking about with his 
hands in his empty pockets, and looking at the Hall from 
some elevation near.” 

“ Is he married ? Has he children ? ” said Clara. 

“Nine; and a wife that cannot cook or sew or wash 
linen.” 

“You could not give him employment ?” 

“After his having dismissed himself ?” 

“It might be overlooked.” 

“Here he was happy. He decided to go elsewhere, to 
be free — of course, of my yoke. He quitted my service 
against my warning. Flitch, we will say, emigrated with 
his wife and nine children, and the ship foundered. He 
returns, but his place is filled; he is a ghost here, and I 
obiect to ghosts.” 


108 


THE EGOIST 


“Some work might be found for him.” 

“It will be the same with old Vernon, my dear. If ho 
goes, he goes for good. It is the vital principle of my 
authority to insist on that. A dead leaf might as reason' 
ably demand to return to the tree. Once off, off for all 
eternity! I am sorry, but such was your decision, my 
friend. I have, you see, Clara, elements in me — ” 

“Dreadful! ” 

“Exert your persuasive powers with Vernon. You can 
do well-nigh what you will with the old fellow. We have 
Miss Dale this evening for a week or two. Lead him to 
some ideas of her. — Elements in me, I was remarking, 
which will no more bear to be handled carelessly than 
gunpowder. At the same time, there is no reason why 
they should not be respected, managed with some degree 
of regard for me and attention to consequences. Those 
who have not done so have repented.” 

“You do not speak to others of the elements in you,” 
said Clara. 

“I certainly do not: I have but one bride,” was his 
handsome reply. 

“ Is it fair to me that you should show me the worst of 
you ? ” 

“ All myself, my own ? ” 

His ingratiating droop and familiar smile rendered 
“All myself” so affectionately meaningful in its happy 
reliance upon her excess of love, that at last she under¬ 
stood she was expected to worship him and uphold him for 
whatsoever he might be, without any estimation of quali¬ 
ties : as indeed love does, or young love does: as she per¬ 
haps did once, before he chilled her senses. That was 
before her “ little brain ” had become active and had turned 
her senses to revolt. 

It was on the full river of love that Sir Willoughby 
supposed the whole floating bulk of his personality to be 
securely sustained; and therefore it was that, believing 
himself swimming at his ease, he discoursed of himself. 

She went straight away from that idea with her mental 
exclamation: “ Why does he not paint himself in brighter 
colours to me! ” and the question: “ Has he no ideal of 
generosity and chivalry ? ” 


THE WILD CHERRY-TREE 


109 


But the unfortunate gentleman imagined himself to be 
loved, on Love’s very bosom. He fancied that everything 
relating to himself excited maidenly curiosity, womanly 
reverence, ardours to know more of him, which he was 
ever willing to satisfy by repeating the same things. His 
notion of women was the primitive black and white: there 
are good women, bad women; and he possessed a good one. 
His high opinion of himself fortified the belief that Provi¬ 
dence, as a matter of justice and fitness, must necessarily 
select a good one for him — or what are we to think of 
Providence? And this female, shaped by that informing 
hand, would naturally be in harmony with him, from the 
centre of his profound identity to the raying circle of his 
variations. Know the centre, you know the circle, and 
you discover that the variations are simply characteristics, 
but you must travel on the rays from the circle to get to 
the centre. Consequently Sir Willoughby put Miss Mid¬ 
dleton on one or other of these converging lines from time 
to time. Us, too, he drags into the deeps, but when we 
have harpooned a whale and are attached to the rope, down 
we must go; the miracle is to see us rise again. 

Women of mixed essences shading off the divine to the 
considerably lower, were outside his vision of woman. 
His mind could as little admit an angel in pottery as a 
rogue in porcelain. For him they were what they were 
when fashioned at the beginning; many cracked, many 
stained, here and there a perfect specimen designed for 
the elect of men. At a whisper of the world he shut 
the prude’s door on them with a slam; himself would 
have branded them with the letters in the hue of fire. 
Privately he did so: and he was constituted by his extreme 
sensitiveness and taste for ultra-feminine refinement to 
be a severe critic of them during the carnival of egoism, 
the love-season. Constantia . . . can it be told ? She had 
been, be it said, a fair and frank young merchant with him 
in that season; she was of a nature to be a mother of 
heroes; she met the salute, almost half-way, ingenuously 
unlike the coming mothers of the regiments of marion- 
nettes, who retire in vapours, downcast, as by convention; 
ladies most flattering to the egoistical gentleman, for they 
proclaim him the “first.” Constantia’s offence had been 


110 


THE EGOIST 


no greater, but it was not that dramatic performance of 
purity which he desired of an affianced lady, and so the 
offence was great. 

The love-season is the carnival of egoism, and it brings 
the touchstone to our natures. I speak of love, not the 
mask, and not of the flutings upon the theme of love, but 
of the passion; aflame having, like our mortality, death 
in it as well as life, that may or may not be lasting. 
Applied to Sir Willoughby, as to thousands of civilized 
males, the touchstone found him requiring to be dealt 
with by his betrothed as an original savage. She was 
required to play incessantly on the first reclaiming chord 
which led our ancestral satyr to the measures of the dance, 
the threading of the maze, and the setting conformably to 
his partner before it was accorded to him to spin her with 
both hands and a chirrup of his frisky heels. To keep 
him in awe and hold him enchained, there are things she 
must never do, dare never say, must not think. She must 
be cloistral. Now, strange and awful though it be to hear, 
women perceive this requirement of them in the spirit of 
the man; they perceive, too, and it may be gratefully, that 
they address their performances less to the taming of the 
green and prankish monsieur of the forest than to the 
pacification of a voracious aesthetic gluttony, craving them 
insatiably, through all the tenses, with shrieks of the 
lamentable letter “ I ” for their purity. Whether they see 
that i% has its foundation in the sensual, and distinguish 
the ultra-refined but lineally great-grandson of the Hoof 
in this vast and dainty exacting appetite is uncertain. 
They probably do not; the more the damage; for in the 
appeasement of the glutton they have to practise much 
simulation; they are in their way losers like their ancient 
mothers. It is the palpable and material of them still 
which they are tempted to flourish wherewith to invite and 
allay pursuit: a condition under which the spiritual, 
wherein their hope lies, languishes. The capaciously 
strong in soul among women will ultimately detect an 
infinite grossness in the demand for purity infinite, spot¬ 
less bloom. Earlier or later they see they have been vic¬ 
tims of the singular Egoist, have worn a mask of ignorance 
to be named innocent, have turned themselves into mark** 


THE WILD CHERRY-TREE 


111 


produce for his deliglit, and have really abandoned the 
commodity in ministering to the lust for it, suffered 
themselves to be dragged ages back in playing upon the 
fleshly innocence of happy accident to gratify his jealous 
greed of possession, when it should have been their task 
to set the soul above the fairest fortune, and the gift of 
strength in women beyond ornamental whiteness. Are 
they not of a nature warriors, like men ? — men’s mates 
to bear them heroes instead of puppets? But the devour¬ 
ing male Egoist prefers them as inanimate overwrought 
polished pure-metal precious vessels, fresh from the hands 
of the artificer, for him to walk away with hugging, call 
all his own, drink of, and fill and drink of, and forget 
that he stole them. 

This running off on a by-road is no deviation from Sir 
Willoughby Patterne and Miss Clara Middleton. He, a 
fairly intelligent man, and very sensitive, was blinded to 
what was going on within her visibly enough, by her pro¬ 
duction of the article he demanded of her sex. He had to 
leave the fair young lady to ride to his county-town, and 
his design was to conduct her through the covert of a group 
of laurels, there to revel in her soft confusion. She re¬ 
sisted; nay, resolutely returned to the lawn-sward. He 
contrasted her with Constantia in the amorous time, and 
rejoiced in his disappointment. He saw the Goddess 
Modesty guarding Purity; and one would be bold to say 
that he did not hear the Precepts, Purity’s aged grannams 
maternal and paternal, cawing approval of her over their 
munching gums. And if you ask whether a man, sensitive 
and a lover, can be so blinded, you are condemned to re¬ 
peruse the foregoing paragraph. 

Miss Middleton was not sufficiently instructed in the 
position of her sex to know that she had plunged herself 
in the thick of the strife of one of their great battles. 
Her personal position, however, was instilling knowledge 
rapidly, as a disease in the frame teaches us what we are 
and have to contend with. Could she marry this man ? 
He was evidently manageable. Could she condescend 
to the use of arts in managing him to obtain a placable 
life ? — a horror of swampy flatness! So vividly did the 
sight of that dead heaY6 n over an unvarying level earth, 


112 


THE EGOIST 


swim on her fancy, that she shut her eyes in angry exclu* 
sion of it as if it were outside, assailing her: and she 
nearly stumbled upon young Crossjay. 

“Oh! have I hurt you ?” he cried. 

“No,” said she, “ it was my fault. Lead me somewhere, 
away from everybody.” 

The boy took her hand, and she resumed her thoughts; 
and, pressing his fingers and feeling warm to him both for 
his presence and silence, so does the blood in youth lead 
the mind, even cool and innocent blood, even with a touch, 
that she said to herself: “ And if I marry, and then . . . 
Where will honour be then ? I marry him to be true to my 
word of honour, and if then! . . .” An intolerable lan¬ 
guor caused her to sigh profoundly. It is written as she 
thought it; she thought in blanks, as girls do, and some 
women. A shadow of the male Egoist is in the chamber 
of their brains overawing them. 

“Were I to marry, and to run! ” There is the thought; 
she is offered up to your mercy. We are dealing with 
a girl feeling herself desperately situated, and not a 
fool. 

“I’m sure you’re dead tired, though,” said Cross jay. 

“No, I am not; what makes you think so ?” said Clara. 

“I do think so.” 

“ But why do you think so ? ” 

“You ’re so hot.” 

“ What makes you think that ? n 

“You ’re so red.” 

“So are you, Cross jay.” 

“I’m only red in the middle of the cheeks, except when 
I ^ve been running. And then you talk to yourself, just 
as boys do when they are blown.” 

“Do they?” 

“They say, ‘ I know I could have kept up longer,’ or, 
‘ my buckle broke,’ all to themselves, when they break 
down running.” 

“ And you have noticed that ? ” 

“ And, Miss Middleton, I don’t wish you were a boy, but 
I should like to live near you all my life and be a gentle¬ 
man. I ’in coming with Miss Dale this evening to stay at 
the Hall and be looked after, instead of stopping with her 


THE WILD CHERRY—THEE 


113 


cousin who takes care of her father. Perhaps you and I ’ll 
play chess at night.” 

“At night you will go to bed, Crossjay.” 

“Not if I have Sir Willoughby to catch hold of. He 
says I ’m an authority on birds’ eggs. I can manage rab¬ 
bits and poultry. Is n’t a farmer a happy man ? But he 
does n’t marry ladies. A cavalry officer has the best 
chance.” 

“But you are going to be a naval officer.” 

“I don’t know. It’s not positive. I shall bring my 
two dormice, and make them perform gymnastics on the 
dinner-table. They ’re such dear little things. Naval 
officers are not like Sir Willoughby.” 

“No, they are not,” said Clara; “they give their lives 
to their country.” 

“ And then they ’re dead,” said Crossjay. 

Clara wished Sir Willoughby were confronting her: she 
could have spoken. 

She asked the boy where Mr. Whitford was. Cross jay 
pointed very secretly in the direction of the double¬ 
blossom wild-cherry. Coming within gaze of the stem she 
beheld Vernon stretched at length, reading, she supposed; 
asleep, she discovered: his finger in the leaves of a book; 
and what book ? She had a curiosity to know the title of 
the book he would read beneath these boughs, and grasping 
Crossjay’s hand fast she craned her neck, as one timorous 
of a fall in peeping over chasms, for a glimpse of the page; 
but immediately, and still with a bent head, she turned 
her face to where the load of virginal blossom, whiter than 
summer-cloud on the sky, showered and drooped and clus¬ 
tered so thick as to claim colour and seem, like higher 
Alpine snows in noon-sunlight, a flush of white. From 
deep to deeper heavens of white, her eyes perched and 
soared. Wonder lived in her. Happiness in the beauty 
of the tree pressed to supplant it, and was more mortal 
and narrower. Reflection came, contracting her vision 
and weighing her to earth. Her reflection was: “He must 
be good who loves to lie and sleep beneath the branches of 
this tree ! ” She would rather have clung to her first im¬ 
pression : wonder so divine, so unbounded, was like soar¬ 
ing into homes of angel-crowded space, sweeping through 


114 


THE EGOIST 


folded and on to folded white fountain-bow of wings, in 
innumerable columns: but the thought of it was no recov¬ 
ery of it; she might as well have striven to be a child. 
The sensation of happiness promised to be less short-lived 
in memory, and would have been, had not her present 
disease of the longing for happiness ravaged every corner 
of it for the secret of its existence. The reflection took 
root. “He must be good! . . .” That reflection vowed 
to endure. Poor by comparison with what it displaced, 
it presented itself to her as conferring something on him, 
and she would not have had it absent though it robbed 
her. 

She looked dow r n. Vernon was dreamily looking up. 

She plucked Crossjay hurriedly away, whispering that 
he had better not wake Mr. Whitford, and then she pro¬ 
posed to reverse their previous chase, and she be the hound 
and he the hare. Cross jay fetched a magnificent start. 
On his glancing behind he saw Miss Middleton walking 
listlessly, with a hand at her side. 

“There’s a regular girl! ” said he, in some disgust; for 
his theory was, that girls always have something the 
matter with them to spoil a game. 


CHAPTER XII 

MISS MIDDLETON AND MR. VERNON WHITFORD 

Looking upward, not quite awakened out of a transient 
doze, at a fair head circled in dazzling blossom, one may 
temporize awhile with common sense, and take it for a 
vision after the eyes have regained direction of the mind. 
Vernon did so until the plastic vision interwound with 
reality alarmingly. This is the embrace of a Melusine 
who will soon have the brain if she is encouraged. Slight 
dalliance with her makes the very diminutive seem as big 
as life. He jumped to his feet, rattled his throat, planted 
firmness on his brows and mouth, and attacked the dream- 
giving earth with tremendous long strides, that his blood 



MISS MIDDLETON AND MR. WHITFORD 


115 


might be lively at the throne of understanding. Miss 
Middleton and young Crossjay were within hail: it was 
her face he had seen, and still the idea of a vision, chased 
from his reasonable wits, knocked hard and again for 
readmission. There was little for a man of humble mind 
toward the sex to think of in the fact of a young lady’s 
bending rather low to peep at him asleep, except that the 
poise of her slender figure, between an air of spying and 
of listening, vividly recalled his likening of her to the 
Mountain Echo. Man or maid sleeping in the open air 
provokes your tip-toe curiosity. Men, it is known, have 
in that state cruelly been kissed; and no rights are be¬ 
stowed on them, they are teased by a vapourish rapture; 
what has happened to them the poor fellows barely divine: 
they have a crazy step from that day. But a vision is 
not so distracting; it is our own, we can put it aside and 
return to it, play at rich and poor with it, and are not to 
be summoned before your laws and rules for secreting it 
in our treasury. Besides, it is the golden key of all the 
possible: new worlds expand beneath the dawn it brings 
us. Just outside reality, it illumines, enriches, and softens 
real things; — and to desire it in preference to the simple 
fact, is a damning proof of enervation. 

Such was Vernon’s winding up of his brief drama of 
fantasy. He was aware of the fantastical element in him 
and soon had it under. Which of us who is of any worth 
is without it ? He had not much vanity to trouble him, 
and passion was quiet, so his task was not gigantic. 
Especially be it remarked, that he was a man of quick 
pace, the sovereign remedy for the dispersing of the mental 
fen-mist. He had tried it and knew that nonsense is to be 
walked off. 

Hear the end of the park young Crossjay overtook him, 
and after acting the pumped one a trifle more than needful, 
cried: “ I say, Mr. Whitford, there’s Miss Middleton with 
her handkerchief out.” 

“What for, my lad ?” said Vernon. 

“I’m sure I don’t know. All of a sudden she bumped 
down. And, look what fellows girls are ! — here she comes 
as if nothing had happened, and I saw her feel at her 
side.” 


116 


THE EGOIST 


Clara was shaking her head to express a denial. “ I am 
not at all unwell/’ she said when she came near. “I 
guessed Crossjay’s business in running up to you; he’s a 
good-for-nothing, officious boy. I was tired, and rested 
for a moment.” 

Crossjay peered at her eyelids. Vernon looked away and 
said: “ Are you too tired for a stroll ? ” 

“Not now.” 

“ Shall it be brisk ? ” 

“You have the lead.” 

He led at a swing of the legs that accelerated young 
Crossjay’s to the double, but she with her short swift 
equal steps glided along easily on a line by his shoulder, 
and he groaned to think that of all the girls of earth this 
one should have been chosen for the position of fine lady. 

“You won’t tire me,” said she, in answer to his look. 

“You remind me of the little Piedmontese Bersaglieri 
on the march.” 

“I have seen them trotting into Como from Milan.” 

“They cover a quantity of ground in a day, if the 
ground ’s flat. You want another sort of step for the 
mountains.” 

“I should not attempt to dance up.” 

“They soon tame romantic notions of them.” 

“The mountains tame luxurious dreams, you mean. I 
see how they are conquered. I can plod. Anything to 
be high up ! ” 

“Well, there you have the secret of good work: to plod 
on and still keep the passion fresh.” 

“Yes, when we have an aim in view.” 

“We always have one.” 

“ Captives have ? ” 

“More than the rest of us.” 

Ignorant man! What of wives miserably wedded? 
What aim in view have these most woeful captives ? 
Horror shrouds it, and shame reddens through the folds 
to tell of innermost horror. 

“Take me back to the mountains, if you please, Mr. 
Whitford,” Miss Middleton said, fallen out of sympathy 
with him. “ Captives have death in view, but that is not 
an aim.” 


MISS MIDDLETON AND MR. WHITFORD 117 


“ Why may not captives expect a release ? ” 

“ Hardly from a tyrant.” 

“ If you are thinking of tyrants, it may be so. Say the 
tyrant dies ? ” 

“ The prison-gates are unlocked and out comes a skele¬ 
ton. But why will you talk of skeletons! The very 
name of mountain seems life in comparison with any other 
subject.” 

“I assure you,” said Vernon, with the fervour of a man 
lighting on an actual truth in his conversation with a 
young lady, “ it’s not the first time I have thought you 
would be at home in the Alps. You would walk and 
climb as well as you dance.” 

She liked to hear Clara Middleton talked of, and of her 
having been thought of: and giving him friendly eyes, 
barely noticing that he was in a glow, she said, “ If you 
speak so encouragingly I shall fancy we are near an 
ascent.” 

“I wish we were,” said he. 

“We can realize it by dwelling on it, don’t you think?” 

“We can begin climbing.” 

“ Oh! ” she squeezed herself shadowily. 

“ Which mountain shall it be ? ” said Vernon in the 
right real earnest tone. 

Miss Middleton suggested a lady’s mountain first, for 
a trial. “ And then, if you think well enough of me — if 
1 have not stumbled more than twice, or asked more than 
ten times how far it is from the top, I should like to be 
promoted to scale a giant.” 

They went up some of the lesser heights of Switzerland 
and Styria, and settled in South Tyrol, the young lady 
preferring this district for the strenuous exercise of her 
climbing powers because she loved Italian colour; and it 
seemed an exceedingly good reason to the genial imagina¬ 
tion she had awakened in Mr. Whitford: “Though,” said 
he abruptly, “you are not so much Italian as French.” 

She hoped she was English, she remarked. 

“ Of course you are English; . . . yes.” He moderated 
his assent with the halting affirmative. 

She inquired wonderingly why he spoke in apparent 
hesitation. 


118 


THE EGOIST 


“Well, you have French feet, for example: French wits; 
French impatience,” he lowered his voice, “and charm.” 

“And love of compliments.” 

“Possibly. I was not conscious of paying them.” 

“ And a disposition to rebel ? ” 

“To challenge authority, at least.” 

“That is a dreadful character.” 

“At all events it is a character.” 

“ Fit for an Alpine comrade ? ” 

“For the best of comrades anywhere.” 

“It is not a piece of drawing-room sculpture: that is the 
most one can say for it! ” she dropped a dramatic sigh. 

Had he been willing she would have continued the 
theme, for the pleasure a poor creature long gnawing her 
sensations finds in seeing herself from the outside. It fell 
away. After a silence, she could not renew it: and he was 
evidently indifferent, having to his own satisfaction dis¬ 
sected and stamped her a foreigner. With it passed her 
holiday. She had forgotten Sir Willoughby: she remem¬ 
bered him and said, “You knew Miss Durham, Mr. 
Whitford.” 

He answered briefly, “I did.” 

“Was she . . . ?” some hot-faced inquiry peered forth 
and withdrew. 

“Very handsome,” said Vernon. 

“English?” 

“Yes: the dashing style of English.” 

“Very courageous.” 

“I daresay she had a kind of courage.” 

“ She did very wrong.” 

“ I won’t say no. She discovered a man more of a match 
with herself; luckily not too late. We ’re at the 
mercy ...” 

“Was she not unpardonable ? ” 

“I should be sorry to think that of any one.” 

“But you agree that she did wrong.” 

“I suppose I do. She made a mistake and she cor¬ 
rected it. If she had not, she would have made a greater 
mistake.” 

“The manner ...” 

“ That was bad — as far as we know. The world has 


MISS MIDDLETON AND MR. WHITFORD 119 

not much right to judge. A false start must now and 
then be made. It’s better not to take notice of it, I 
think.” 

“ What is it we are at the mercy of ? ” 

“ Currents of feeling, our natures. I am the last man 
to preach on the subject: young ladies are enigmas to me; 
I fancy they must have a natural perception of the hus¬ 
band suitable to them, and the reverse; and if they have 
a certain degree of courage, it follows that they please 
themselves.” 

“ They are not to reflect on the harm they do ? ” said 
Miss Middleton. 

“By all means let them reflect; they hurt nobody by 
doing that.” 

“ But a breach of faith! ” 

“If the faith can be kept through life, all ’s well.” 

“ And then there is the cruelty, the injury! ” 

“I really think that if a young lady came to me to in¬ 
form me she must break our engagement — I have never 
been put to the proof, but to suppose it: — I should not 
think her cruel.” 

“Then she would not be much of a loss.” 

“And I should not think so for this reason, that it is 
impossible for a girl to come to such a resolution without 
previously showing signs of it to her . . . the man she is 
engaged to. I think it unfair to engage a girl for longer 
than a week or two, just time enough for her preparations 
and publications.” 

“If he is always intent on himself, signs are likely to 
be unheeded by him,” said Miss Middleton. 

He did not answer, and she said quickly, — 

“ It must always be a cruelty. The world will think so. 
It is an act of inconstancy.” 

“If they knew one another well before they were 
engaged.” 

“ Are you not singularly tolerant ? ” said she. 

To which Vernon replied with airy cordiality, — 

“In some cases it is right to judge by results; we ’ll 
leave severity to the historian, who is bound to be a pro¬ 
fessional moralist and put pleas of human nature out of 
the scales. The lady in question may have been to blame, 


120 


THE EGOIST 


but no hearts were broken, and here we have four happy 
instead of two miserable.” 

His persecuting geniality of countenance appealed to her 
to confirm this judgement by results, and she nodded and 
said, “Four,” as the awe-stricken speak. 

From that moment until young Crossjay fell into the 
green-rutted lane from a tree, and was got on his legs 
half-stunned, with a hanging lip and a face like the inside 
of a flayed eel-skin, she might have been walking in the 
desert, and alone, for the pleasure she had in society. 

They led the fated lad home between them, singularly 
drawn together by their joint ministrations to him, in 
which her delicacy had to stand fire, and sweet good 
nature made naught of any trial. They were hand in 
hand with the little fellow as physician and professional 
nurse. 


CHAPTER XIII 

THE FIRST EFFORT AFTER FREEDOM 

Crossjay’s accident was only another proof, as Vernon 
told Miss Dale, that the boy was but half monkey. 

“ Something fresh ? ” she exclaimed on seeing him 
brought into the Hall, where she had just arrived. 

“Simply a continuation,” said Vernon. “He is not so 
prehensile as he should be. He probably in extremity 
relies on the tail that has been docked. Are you a man, 
Crossjay ? ” 

“I should think I was!” Crossjay replied with an old 
man’s voice, and a ghastly twitch for a smile overwhelmed 
the compassionate ladies. 

Miss Dale took possession of him. “You err in the 
other direction,” she remarked to Vernon. 

“ But a little bracing roughness is better than spoiling 
him,” said Miss Middleton. 

She did not receive an answer, and she thought,“What¬ 
ever Willoughby does is right, to this lady 1 ” 


THE FIRST EFFORT AFTER FREEDOM 121 

Clara’s impression was renewed when Sir Willoughby 
sat beside Miss Dale in the evening; and certainly she had 
never seen him shine so picturesquely as in his bearing 
with Miss Dale. The sprightly sallies of the two, their 
rallyings, their laughter, and her fine eyes, and his hand¬ 
some gestures, won attention like a fencing match of a 
couple keen with the foils to display the mutual skill. 
And it was his design that she should admire the display; 
he was anything but obtuse; enjoying the match as he did 
and necessarily did to act so excellent a part in it, he 
meant the observer to see the man he was with a lady not 
of raw understanding. So it went on from day to day for 
three days. 

She fancied once that she detected the agreeable stirring 
of the brood of jealousy, and found it neither in her heart 
nor in her mind, but in the book of wishes, well known to 
the young, where they write matter which may sometimes 
be independent of both those volcanic albums. Jealousy 
would have been a relief to her, a dear devil’s aid. She 
studied the complexion of jealousy to delude herself with 
the sense of the spirit being in her, and all the while she 
laughed, as at a vile theatre whereof the imperfection of 
the stage machinery rather than the performance is the 
wretched source of amusement. 

Vernon had deeply depressed her. She was hunted by 
the figure 4. Four happy instead of two miserable. He 
had said it, involving her among the four; and so it must 
be, she considered, and she must be as happy as she 
could; for not only was he incapable of perceiving her 
state, he was unable to imagine other circumstances to 
surround her. How, to be just to him, were they imagi¬ 
nable by him or any one ? 

Her horrible isolation of secresy in a world amiable in 
unsuspectingness, frightened her. To fling away her 
secret, to conform, to be unrebellious, uncritical, submis¬ 
sive, became an impatient desire; and the task did not 
appear so difficult since Miss Dale’s arrival. Endearments 
had been rarer, more formal; living bodily untroubled 
and unashamed, and, as she phrased it, having no one to 
care for her, she turned insensibly in the direction where 
she was due; she Sughtly imitated Miss Dale’s colloquial 


122 


THE EGOIST 


responsiveness. To tell truth, she felt vivacious in a 
moderate way with Willoughby after seeing him with 
Miss Dale. Liberty wore the aspect of a towering prison- 
wall; the desperate undertaking of climbing one side and 
dropping to the other was more than she, unaided, could 
resolve on; consequently, as no one cared for her, a 
worthless creature might as well cease dreaming and stip¬ 
ulating for the fulfilment of her dreams; she might as well 
yield to her fate: nay, make the best of it. 

Sir Willoughby was flattered and satisfied. Clara’s 
adopted vivacity proved his thorough knowledge of femi¬ 
nine nature; nor did her feebleness in sustaining it dis¬ 
please him. A steady look of hers had of late perplexed 
the man, and he was comforted by signs of her inefficiency 
where he excelled. The effort and the failure were both 
of good omen. 

But she could not continue the effort. He had over¬ 
weighted her too much for the mimicry of a sentiment to 
harden and have an apparently natural place among her 
impulses; and now an idea came to her that he might, ifc 
-night be hoped, possibly see in Miss Dale, by present 
contrast, the mate he sought; by contrast with an unan¬ 
swering creature like herself, he might perhaps realize 
in Miss Dale’s greater accomplishments and her devotion 
to him the merit of suitability; he might be induced to do 
her justice. Dim as the loophole was, Clara fixed her 
mind on it till it gathered light. And as a prelude to 
action, she plunged herself into a state of such profound 
humility, that to accuse it of being simulated would be 
venturesome, though it was not positive. The tempers of 
the young are liquid fires in isles of quicksand; the pre¬ 
cious metals not yet cooled in a solid earth. Her compas¬ 
sion for Lsetitia was less forced; but really she was almost 
as earnest in her self-abasement, for she had not latterly 
been brilliant, not even adequate to the ordinary require¬ 
ments of conversation. She had no courage, no wit, no 
diligence, nothing that she could distinguish save discon¬ 
tentment like a corroding acid, and she went so far in 
sincerity as with a curious shift of feeling to pity the man 
plighted to her. If it suited her purpose to pity Sir Wil- 
’oughby, she was not moved by policy, be assured; her 


THE FIRST EFFORT AFTER FREEDOM 


123 


needs were her nature, her moods her mind; she had the 
capacity to make anything serve her by passing into it 
with the glance which discerned its usefulness; and this 
is how it is that the young, when they are in trouble, 
without approaching the elevation of scientific hypocrites, 
can teach that able class lessons in hypocrisy. 

“Why should not Willoughby be happy ?” she said; and 
the explanation was pushed forth by the second thought: 
“Then I shall be free! ” Still that thought came second. 

The desire for the happiness of Willoughby was fervent 
on his behalf, and wafted her far from* friends and letters 
to a narrow Tyrolean valley, where a shallow river ran, 
with the indentations of a remotely-seen army of winding 
ranks in column, topaz over the pebbles, to hollows ol 
ravishing emerald. There sat Liberty, after her fearful 
leap over the prison-wall, at peace to watch the water and 
the falls of sunshine on the mountain above, between 
descending pine-stem shadows. Clara’s wish for his hap¬ 
piness, as soon as she had housed herself in the imagina¬ 
tion of her freedom, was of a purity that made it seem 
exceedingly easy for her to speak to him. 

The opportunity was offered by Sir Willoughby. Every 
morning after breakfast, Miss Dale walked across the park 
to see her father, and on this occasion Sir Willoughby 
and Miss Middleton went with her as far as the lake, all 
three discoursing of the beauty of various trees, birches, 
aspens, poplars, beeches, then in their new green. Miss 
Dale loved the aspen, Miss Middleton the beech, Sir Wil¬ 
loughby the birch, and pretty things were said by each in 
praise of the favoured object, particularly by Miss Dale. 
So much so that when she had gone on he recalled one 
of her remarks, and said: “I believe, if the whole place 
were swept away to-morrow, Laetitia Dale could recon¬ 
struct it, and put those aspens on the north of the lake in 
number and situation correctly where you have them now, 
I would guarantee her description of it in absence 
correct.” 

“Why should she be absent?” said Clara, palpitating. 

“Well, why!” returned Sir Willoughby. “As you 
say, there is no reason why. The art of life, and mine 
will be principally a country life — town is not life, but a 


124 


THE EGOIST 


tornado whirling atoms- the art is to associate a group of 
sympathetic friends in our neighbourhood; and it is a fact 
worth noting that if ever I feel tired of the place, a short 
talk with Laetitia Dale refreshes it more than a month or 
two on the Continent. She has the well of enthusiasm. 
And there is a great advantage in having a cultivated 
person at command, with whom one can chat of any topic 
under the sun. I repeat, you have no need of town if you 
have friends like Laetitia Dale within call. My mother 
esteemed her highly.” 

“Willoughby, she is not obliged to go.” 

“I hope not. And, my love, I rejoice that you have 
taken to her. Her father’s health is poor. She would 
be a young spinster to live alone in a country cottage.” 

“ What of your scheme ? ” 

“Old Vernon is a very foolish fellow.” 

“He has declined ? ” 

“Not a word on the subject! I have only to propose it 
to be snubbed, I know.” 

“You may not be aware how you throw him into the 
shade with her.” 

“Nothing seems to teach him the art of dialogue with 
ladies.” 

“Are not gentlemen shy when they see themselves out¬ 
shone ? ” 

“ He has n’t it, my love: Vernon is deficient in the lady’s 
tongue. ” 

“I respect him for that.” 

“ Outshone, you say ? I do not know of any shining — 
save to one, who lights me, path and person! ” 

The identity of the one was conveyed to her in a bow and 
a soft pressure. 

“Not only has he not the lady’s tongue, which I hold to 
be a man’s proper accomplishment,” continued Sir Wil¬ 
loughby, “ he cannot turn his advantages to account. Here 
has Miss Dale been with him now four days in the house. 
They are exactly on the same footing as when she entered it. 
You ask ? I will tell you. It is this : it is want of warmth. 
Old Vernon is a scholar — and a fish. Well, perhaps he has 
cause to be shy of matrimony: but he is a fish.” 

“ You are reconciled to his leaving you ? ” 


THE FIRST EFFORT AFTER FREEDOM ll&i 

“ False alarm ! The resolution to do anything unaccus* 
tomed is quite beyond old Vernon.” 

“ But if Mr. Oxford — Whitford . . . your swans coming 
sailing up the lake, how beautiful they look when they are 
indignant! I was going to ask you, surely men witnessing 
a marked admiration for some one else will naturally be 
discouraged ? ” 

Sir Willoughby stiffened with sudden enlightenment. 
Though the word jealousy had not been spoken, the drift of 
her observations was clear. Smiling inwardly, he said, and 
the sentences were not enigmas to her: “ Surely, too, young 
ladies ... a little ? — Too far ? But an old friendship ! 
About the same as the fitting of an old glove to a hand. 
Hand and glove have only to meet. Where there is natural 
harmony you would not have discord. Ay, but you have it 
if you check the harmony. My dear girl! You child! ” 

He had actually, in this parabolic and commendable 
obscureness, for which she thanked him in her soul, struck 
the very point she had not named and did not wish to hear 
named, but wished him to strike. His exultation, of the 
compressed sort, was extreme, on hearing her cry out, — 

“ Young ladies may be. Oh! not I, not I. I can con¬ 
vince you. Not that. Believe me, Willoughby. I do not 
know what it is to feel that, or anything like it. I cannot 
conceive a claim on any one’s life — as a claim: or the con¬ 
tinuation of an engagement not founded on perfect, perfect 
sympathy. How should I feel it, then ? It is, as you say 
of Mr. Ox — Whitford, beyond me.” 

Sir Willoughby caught up the Ox — Whitford. 

Bursting with laughter in his joyful pride, he called it a 
portrait of old Vernon in society. For she thought a trifle 
too highly of Vernon, as here and there a raw young lady 
does think of the friends of her plighted man: which is 
waste of substance properly belonging to him: as it were, 
in the loftier sense, an expenditure in genuflexions to way- 
side idols of the reverence she should bring intact to the 
temple. Derision instructs her. 

Of the other subject — her jealousy — he had no desire to 
hear more. She had winced: the woman had been touched 
to smarting in the girl: enough. She attempted the subject 
once, but faintly, and his careless parrying threw her out 


120 


THE EGOIST 


Clara could have bitten her tongue for that reiterated stupid 
slip on the name of Whitford; and because she was innocent 
at heart she persisted in asking herself how she could be 
guilty of it. 

“ You both know the botanic titles of these wild-flowers,” 
she said. 

“Who?” he inquired. 

“You and Miss Dale.” 

Sir Willoughby shrugged. He was amused. 

“No woman on earth will grace a barouche so exquisitely 
as my Clara! ” 

“ Where ? ” said she. 

“ During our annual two months in London. I drive a 
barouche there, and venture to prophecy that my equipage 
will create the greatest excitement of any in London. I see 
old Horace De Craye gazing! ” 

She sighed. She could not drag him to the word, or a 
hint of it necessary to her subject. 

But there it was ; she saw it. She had nearly let it go, 
and blushed at being obliged to name it. 

“ Jealousy, do you mean, Willoughby ? the people in 
London would be jealous ? — Colonel De Craye ? How 
strange! That is a sentiment I cannot understand.” 

Sir Willoughby gesticulated the “ Of course not ” of an 
established assurance to the contrary. 

“ Indeed, Willoughby, I do not.” 

“Certainly not.” 

He was now in her trap. And he was imagining himself 
to be anatomizing her feminine nature. 

“ Can I give you a proof, Willoughby ? I am so utterly 
incapable of it that — listen to me — were you to come to me 
to tell me, as you might, how much better suited to you 
Miss Dale has appeared than I am — and I fear I am not; it 
should be spoken plainly; unsuited altogether, perhaps — I 
would, I beseech you to believe — you must believe me — give 
you . . . give you your freedom instantly; most truly ; and 
engage to speak of you as I should think of you. Wil¬ 
loughby, you would have no one to praise you in public 
and in private as I should, for you would be to me the most 
honest, truthful, chivalrous gentleman alive. And in that 
case I would undertake to declare that she would not admire 


THE FIRST EFFORT AFTER FREEDOM 127 

you more than Is Miss Dale would not; she would not 
admire you more than I; not even Miss Dale! ” 

This, her first direct leap for liberty, set Clara panting, 
and so much had she to say that the nervous and the intel¬ 
lectual halves of her clashed like cymbals, dazing and 
stunning her with the appositeness of things to be said, and 
dividing her in indecision as to the cunningest to move him, 
of the many pressing. 

The condition of feminine jealousy stood revealed. 

He had driven her farther than he intended. 

“Come, let me allay these . . .” he soothed her with 
hand and voice while seeking for his phrase ; “ these magni¬ 
fied pin-points. Now, my Clara ! on my honour ! and when 
I put it forward in attestation, my honour has the most 
serious meaning speech can have; ordinarily my word has 
to suffice for bonds, promises or asseverations: on my 
honour! not merely is there, my poor child! no ground of 
suspicion, I assure you, I declare to you, the fact of the case 
is the very reverse. Now, mark me; of her sentiments I 
cannot pretend to speak; I did not, to my knowledge, 
originate, I am not responsible for them, and I am, before 
the law, as we will say, ignorant of them: that is, I have 
never heard a declaration of them, and I am, therefore, un¬ 
der pain of the stigma of excessive fatuity, bound to be non- 
cognizant. But as to myself, I can speak for myself, and, 
on my honour! Clara—to be as direct as possible, even to 
baldness, and you know I loathe it — I could not, I repeat, 
I could not marry Lcetitia Dale ! Let me impress it on you. 
No flatteries — we are all susceptible more or less — no con¬ 
ceivable condition could bring it about; no amount of admi¬ 
ration. She and I are excellent friends ; we cannot be more. 
When you see us together, the natural concord of our minds 
is of course misleading. She is a woman of genius. I do 
not conceal, I profess my admiration of her. There are 
times when, I confess, I require a Laetitia Dale to bring me 
out, give and take. I am indebted to her for the enjoyment 
of the duet few know, few can accord with, fewer still are 
allowed the privilege of playing with a human being. I am 
indebted, I own, and I feel deep gratitude; I own to a lively 
friendship for Miss Dale, but if she is displeasing in the 
sight of my bride by ... by the breadth of an eyelash, 
then . . 


128 


THE EGOIST 


Sir Willoughby’s arm waved Miss Dale off away into 
outer darkness in the wilderness. 

Clara shut her eyes and rolled her eyeballs in a frenzy of 
unuttered revolt. 

But she was not engaged in the colloquy to be an advo¬ 
cate of Miss Dale or of common humanity. 

“Ah!” she said, simply determining that the subject 
should not drop. 

“ And, ah I ” he mocked her tenderly. “ True, though! 
And who knows better than my Clara that I require youth, 
health, beauty, and the other undefinable attributes fitting 
with mine and beseeming the station of the lady called to 
preside over my household and represent me ? What says 
my other self ? my fairer ? But you are! my love, you are ! 
Understand my nature rightly, and you . . .” 

“I do! I do!” interposed Clara: “if I did not by this 
time I should be idiotic. Let me assure you, I understand 
it. Oh! listen to me : one moment. Miss Dale regards me 
as the happiest woman on earth. Willoughby, if I pos¬ 
sessed her good qualities, her heart and mind, no doubt I 
should be. It is my wish — you must hear me, hear me 
out — my wish, my earnest wish, my burning prayer, my 
wish to make way for her. She appreciates you: I do not 
— to my shame, I do not. She worships you: I do not, I 
cannot. You are the rising sun to her. It has been so for 
years. No one can account for love: I daresay not for the 
impossibility of loving . . . loving where we should; all 
love bewilders me. I was not created to understand it. 
But she loves you, she has pined. I believe it has destroyed 
the health you demand as one item in your list. But you, 
Willoughby, can restore that. Travelling, and . . . and 
your society, the pleasure of your society would certainly 
restore it. You look so handsome together ! She has un¬ 
bounded devotion: as for me I cannot idolize. I see faults; 
I see them daily. They astonish and wound me. Your 
pride would not bear to hear them spoken of, least of all by 
your wife. You warned me to beware — that is, you said, 
you said something.” 

Her busy brain missed the subterfuge to cover her slip of 
the tongue. 

Sir Willoughby struck in: “And when I say that the 


THE FIRST EFFORT AFTER FREEDOM 


129 


entire concatenation is based on an erroneous observation 
of facts, and an erroneous deduction from that erroneous 
observation !— ? No, no. Have confidence in me. I pro¬ 
pose it to you in this instance, purely to save you from 
deception. You are cold, my love ? you shivered.’’ 

“ I am not cold,” said Clara. “ Some one, I suppose, was 
walking over my grave.” 

The gulf of a caress hove in view like an enormous billow 
hollowing under the curled ridge. 

She stooped to a buttercup ; the monster swept by. 

“ Your grave ! ” he exclaimed over her head; “ my own 
girl! ” 

“ Is not the orchis naturally a stranger in ground so far 
away from the chalk, Willoughby? ” 

“I am incompetent to pronounce an opinion on such 
important matters. My mother had a passion for every 
description of flower. I fancy I have some recollection of 
her scattering the flower you mention over the park.” 

“ If she were living now ! ” 

“We should be happy in the blessing of the most esti¬ 
mable of women, my Clara.” 

“ She would have listened to me. She would have real¬ 
ized what I mean.” 

“Indeed, Clara — poor soul!” he murmured to himself 
aloud: “ indeed you are absolutely in error. If I have 
seemed — but I repeat, you are deceived. The idea of 
‘ fitness 9 is a total hallucination. Supposing you — I do it 
even in play painfully — entirely out of the way, unthought 
of ... ” 

“ Extinct,” Clara said low. 

“Non-existent for me,” he selected a preferable term. 
“ Suppose it; I should still, in spite of an admiration I have 
never thought it incumbent on me to conceal, still be — I 
speak emphatically — utterly incapable of the offer of my 
hand to Miss Dale. It may be that she is embedded in my 
mind as a friend, and nothing but a friend. I received the 
stamp in early youth. People have noticed it — we do, it 
seems, bring one another out, reflecting, counter-reflecting.” 

She glanced up at him with a shrewd satisfaction to see 
that her wicked shaft had stuck. 

“You do: it is a common remark,” she said. “The 


130 


THE EGOIST 


instantaneous difference when she comes near, any one 
might notice.” 

“My love,” he opened the iron gate into the garden, 
“you encourage the naughty little suspicion.” 

“ But it is a beautiful sight, Willoughby. I like to see 
you together. I like it as I like to see colours match.” 

“Very well. There is no harm,then. We shall often be 
together. I like my fair friend. But the instant! — you 
have only to express a sentiment of disapprobation.” 

“And you dismiss her.” 

“ I dismiss her. That is, as to the word, I constitute 
myself your echo, to clear any vestige of suspicion. She 
goes.” 

“ That is a case of a person doomed to extinction without 
offending.” 

“Not without: for whoever offends my bride, my wife, 
my sovereign lady, offends me: very deeply offends me.” 

“Then the caprices of your wife ...” Clara stamped 
her foot imperceptibly on the lawn-sward, which was irre¬ 
sponsibly soft to her fretfulness. She broke from the 
inconsequent meaningless mild tone of irony, and said: 
‘ Willoughby, women have their honour to swear by equally 
with men : — girls have : they have to swear an oath at the 
altar: may I to you now? Take it for uttered when I tell 
you that nothing would make me happier than your union 
with Miss Dale. I have spoken as much as I can. Tell 
me you release me.” 

With the well-known screw-smile of duty upholding 
weariness worn to inanition, he rejoined: “ Allow me once 
more to reiterate, that it is repulsive, inconceivable, that I 
should ever , under any mortal conditions , bring myself to the 
'point of taking Miss Dale for my wife. You reduce me 
to this perfectly childish protestation — pitiably childish ! 
But, my love, have I to remind you that you and I are 
plighted, and that I am an honourable man ? ” 

“ I know it, I feel it, release me ! ” cried Clara. 

Sir Willoughby severely reprehended his shortsighted¬ 
ness for seeing but the one proximate object in the par¬ 
ticular attention he had bestowed on Miss Dale. He could 
not disavow that they had been marked, and with an object, 
and he was distressed by the unwonted want of wisdom 


THE FIRST EFFORT AFTER FREEDOM 


131 


through which he had been drawn to overshoot his object. 
His design to excite a touch of the insane emotion in Clara’s 
bosom was too successful, and, “ I was not thinking of her,” 
he said to himself in his candour, contrite. 

She cried again: “ Will you not, Willoughby ? — release 
me ?” 

He begged her to take his arm. 

To consent to touch him while petitioning for a detach¬ 
ment, appeared discordant to Clara, but, if she expected 
him to accede, it was right that she should do as much as 
she could, and she surrendered her hand at arm’s length, 
disdaining the imprisoned fingers. He pressed them and 
said: “ Dr. Middleton is in the library. I see Vernon is 
at work with Cross jay in the West-room — the boy has had 
sufficient for the day. Now, is it not like old Vernon to 
drive his books at a cracked head before it’s half-mended ? ” 

He signalled to young Cross jay, who was up and out 
through the folding windows in a twinkling. 

“And you will go in, and talk to Vernon of the lady in 
question,” Sir Willoughby whispered to Clara. “ Use your 
best persuasions in our joint names. You have my warrant 
for saying that money is no consideration; house and income 
are assured. You can hardly have taken me seriously when 
I requested you to undertake Vernon before. I was quite 
in earnest then as now. I prepare Miss Dale. I will not 
have a wedding on our wedding-day: but either before or 
after it, I gladly speed their alliance. I think now I give 
you the best proof possible ; and though I know that with 
women a delusion may be seen to be groundless and still be 
cherished, I rely on your good sense.” 

Vernon was at the window and stood aside for her to 
enter. Sir Willoughby used a gentle insistance with her. 
She bent her head as if she were stepping into a cave. So 
frigid was she, that a ridiculous dread of calling Mr. Whit- 
ford Mr. Oxford was her only present anxiety when Sir 
Willoughby had closed the window on them. 


132 


THE EGOIST 


CHAPTER XIV 

SIR WILLOUGHBY AND LA2TITIA 

“I prepare Miss Dale.” 

Sir Willoughby thought of his promise to Clara. He 
trifled awhile with young Crossjay, and then sent the boy 
flying, and wrapped himself in meditation. So shall you 
see standing many a statue of statesmen who have died in 
harness for their country. 

In the hundred and fourth chapter of the thirteenth 
volume of the Book of Egoism, it is written: Possession 
without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity./ 

It is the rarest condition of ownership. For example i 
the possession of land is not without obligation both to the 
soil and the tax-collector; the possession of fine clothing 
is oppressed by obligation: gold, jewelry, works of art, 
enviable household furniture, are positive fetters : the pos¬ 
session of a wife we find surcharged with obligation. In all 
these cases, possession is a gentle term for enslavement, 
bestowing the sort of felicity attained to by the helot drunk. 
You can have the joy, the pride, the intoxication of posses¬ 
sion : you can have no free soul. 

But there is one instance of possession, and that the most 
perfect, which leaves us free, under not a shadow of obli¬ 
gation, receiving ever, never giving, or if giving, giving 
only of our waste; as it were (sauf votre respect), by form 
of perspiratiop, radiation, if you like; unconscious poral 
bountifulness; and it is a beneficial process for the sys¬ 
tem. Our possession of an adoring female’s worship is this 
instance. 

The soft cherishable Parsee is hardly at any season other 
than prostrate. She craves nothing save that you continue 
in being — her sun : which is your firm constitutional endeav¬ 
our : and thus you have a most exact alliance ; she supply¬ 
ing spirit to your matter, while at the same time presenting 
matter to your spirit, verily a comfortable apposition. The 
Gods do bless it. 


SIR WILLOUGHBY AND LiETITIA 


133 


That they do so indeed is evident in the men they select 
for such a felicitous crown and aureole. Weak men would 
be rendered nervous by the flattery of a woman’s worship ; 
or they would be for returning it, at least partially, as 
though it could be bandied to and fro without emulgence 
of the poetry; or they would be pitiful, and quite spoil the 
thing. Some would be for transforming the beautiful soli¬ 
tary vestal flame by the first effort of the multiplication- 
table into your hearth-fire of slippered affection. So these 
men are not they whom the Gods have ever selected, but 
rather men of a pattern with themselves, very high and very 
solid men, who maintain the crown by holding divinely in¬ 
dependent of the great emotion they have sown. 

Even for them a pass of danger is ahead, as we shall see 
in our sample of one among the highest of them. 

A clear approach to felicity had long been the portion of 
Sir Willoughby Patterne in his relations with Laetitia Dale. 
She belonged to him; he was quite unshackled by her. She 
was everything that is good in a parasite, nothing that is 
bad. His dedicated critic she was, reviewing him with a 
favour equal to perfect efficiency in her office; and whatever 
the world might say of him, to her the happy gentleman 
could constantly turn for his refreshing balsamic bath. She 
flew to the soul in him, pleasingly arousing sensations of 
that inhabitant; and he allowed her the right to fly, in the 
manner of kings, as we have heard, consenting to the privi¬ 
leges acted on by cats. These may not address their 
Majesties, but they may stare; nor will it be contested that 
the attentive circular eyes of the humble domestic creatures 
are an embellishment to Koyal pomp and grandeur, such 
truly as should one day gain for them an inweaving and 
figurement — in the place of bees, ermine tufts, and their 
various present decorations — upon the august great robes 
back-flowing and foaming over the gaspy page-boys. 

Further to quote from the same volume of The Book : 
There is pain in the surrendering of that we are fain to 
relinquish . 

The idea is too exquisitely attenuate, as are those of the 
whole body-guard of the heart of Egoism, and will slip 
through you unless you shall have made a study of the 
gross of volumes of the first and second sections of The 


134 


THE EGOIST 


Book, and that will take you up to senility; or you must 
make a personal entry into the pages, perchance; or an 
escape out of them. There was once a venerable gentleman 
for whom a white hair grew on the cop of his nose, laughing 
at removals. He resigned himself to it in the end, and 
lastingly contemplated the apparition. It does not concern 
us what effect was produced on his countenance and his 
mind; enough that he saw a fine thing, but not so fine as 
the idea cited above ; which has been between the two eyes 
of humanity ever since women were sought in marriage. 
With yonder old gentleman it may have been a ghostly hair 
or a disease of the optic nerves; but for us it is a real 
growth, and humanity might profitably imitate him in his 
patient speculation upon it. 

Sir Willoughby Patterne, though ready in the pursuit of 
duty and policy (an oft-united couple) to cast Miss Dale 
away, had to consider that he was not simply, so to speak, 
casting her over a hedge, he was casting her for a man to 
catch her; and this was a much greater trial than it had 
been on the previous occasion, when she went over bump to 
the ground. In the arms of a husband, there was no know¬ 
ing how soon she might forget her soul’s fidelity. It had 
not hurt him to sketch the project of the conjunction; 
benevolence assisted him; but he winced and smarted on 
seeing it take shape. It sullied his idea of Laetitia. 

Still, if, in spite of so great a change in her fortune, her 
spirit could be guaranteed changeless, he, for the sake of 
pacifying his bride, and to keep two serviceable persons 
near him at command, might resolve to join them. The 
vision of his resolution brought with it a certain pallid con¬ 
tempt of the physically faithless woman; no wonder he 
betook himself to The Book, and opened it on the scorching 
chapters treating of the sex, and the execrable wiles of that 
foremost creature of the chase, who runs for life. She is 
not spared in the Biggest of Books. But close it. 

The writing in it having been done chiefly by men, men 
naturally receive their fortification from its wisdom, and 
half a dozen of the popular sentences for the confusion of 
women (cut in brass worn to a polish like sombre gold), 
refreshed Sir Willoughby for his undertaking. 

An examination of Lsetitia’s faded complexion braced him 
very cordially. 


SIR WILLOUGHBY AND LAETITIA 


185 


His Clara jealous of this poor leaf! 

He could have desired the transfusion of a quality or two 
from Laetitia to his bride; but you cannot, as in cookery, 
obtain a mixture of the essences of these creatures; and if, 
as it is possible to do, and as he had been doing recently 
with the pair of them at the Hall, you stew them in one pot, 
you are far likelier to intensify their little birth-marks of 
individuality. Had they a tendency to excellence, it might 
be otherwise ; they might then make the exchanges we wish 
for; or scientifically concocted in a harem for a sufficient 
length of time by a sultan anything but obtuse, they might. 
It is however fruitless to dwell on what was only a glimpse 
of a wild regret, like the crossing of two express trains 
along the rails in Sir Willoughby’s head. 

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel were sitting with Miss 
Dale, all three at work on embroideries. He had merely 
to look at Miss Eleanor. She rose. She looked at Miss 
Isabel, and rattled her chatelaine to account for her depar¬ 
ture. After a decent interval Miss Isabel glided out. Such 
was the perfect discipline of the household. 

Sir Willoughby played an air on the knee of his crossed 
leg. 

Laetitia grew conscious of a meaning in the silence. She 
said, “ You have not been vexed by affairs to-day ? ” 

“ Affairs,” he replied, “ must be peculiarly vexatious to 
trouble me. Concerning the country or my personal 
affairs ? ” 

“I fancy I was alluding to the country.” 

“ I trust I am as good a patriot as any man living,” said 
he ; “ but I am used to the follies of my countrymen, and 
we are on board a stout ship. At the worst, it’s no worse 
than a rise in rates and taxes; soup at the Hall-gates, 
perhaps; licence to fell timber in one of the outer copses, 
or some dozen loads of coal. You hit my feudalism.” 

“ The knight in armour has gone,” said Laetitia, “ and the 
castle with the drawbridge. Immunity for our island has 
gone too since we took to commerce.” 

“ We bartered independence for commerce. You hit our 
old controversy. Ay, but we do not want this overgrown 
population! However, we will put politics and sociology 
and the pack of their modern barbarous words aside. You 


136 


THE EGOIST 


read me intuitively. I have been, I will not say annoyed, 
but ruffled. I have much to do, and going into Parliament 
would make me almost helpless if I lose Vernon. You 
know of some absurd notion he has ? — literary fame, and 
bachelor’s chambers, and a chop-house, and the rest of it.” 

She knew; and thinking differently in the matter of 
literary fame, she flushed, and ashamed of the flush, 
frowned. 

He bent over to her with the perusing earnestness of a 
gentleman about to trifle. 

“You cannot intend that frown?” 

“ Did I frown ? ” 

“ You do.” 

“Now?” 

“ Fiercely.” 

“Oh!” 

“Will you smile to reassure me?” 

“Willingly, as well as I can.” 

A gloom overcame him. With no woman on earth did 
he shine so as to recall to himself seigneur and dame of the 
old French Court, as he did with Laetitia Dale. He did not 
wish the period revived, but reserved it as a garden to stray 
into when he was in the mood for displaying elegance and 
brightness in the society of a lady; and in speech Laetitia 
helped him to the nice delusion. She was not devoid of 
grace of bearing, either. 

Would she preserve her beautiful responsiveness to his 
ascendancy ? Hitherto she had, and for years, and quite 
fresh. But how of her as a married woman ? Our souls 
are hideously subject to the conditions of our animal nature ! 
A wife, possibly mother, it was within sober calculation that 
there would be great changes in her. And the hint of any 
change appeared a total change to one of the lofty order 
who, when they are called on to relinquish possession' 
instead of aspiring to it, say, All or nothing! 

Well, but if there was danger of the marriage-tie affecting 
the slightest alteration of her character or habit of mind, 
wherefore press it upon a tolerably hardened spinster! 

Besides, though he did once put her hand in Vernon’s for 
the dance, he remembered acutely that the injury then done 
by his generosity to his oender sensitiveness had sickened 


SIR WILLOUGHBY AND LiETITIA 


137 


and tarnished the effulgence of two or three successive 
anniversaries of his coining of age. Nor had he altogether 
yet got over the passion of greed for the whole group of the 
well-favoured of the fair sex, which in his early youth had 
made it bitter for him to submit to the fickleness, not to say 
immodest fickleness, of any handsome one of them in yield¬ 
ing her hand to a man, and suffering herself to be led away. 
Ladies whom he had only heard of as ladies of some beauty, 
incurred his wrath for having lovers or taking husbands. 
He was of a vast embrace; and do not exclaim, in covetous¬ 
ness — for well he knew that even under Moslem law he 
could not have them all; — but as the enamoured custodian 
of the sex’s purity, that blushes at such big spots as lovers 
and husbands; and it was unbearable to see it sacrificed for 
others. Without their purity what are they! — what are 
fruiterer’s plums ? — unsaleable. 0 for the bloom on them ! 

“ As I said, I lose my right hand in Vernon,” he resumed, 
“ and I am, it seems, inevitably to lose him, unless we con¬ 
trive to fasten him down here. I think, my dear Miss Dale, 
you have my character. At least, I should recommend my 
future biographer to you — with a caution, of course. You 
would have to write selfishness with a dash under it. I can¬ 
not endure to lose a member of my household — not under 
any circumstances; and a change of feeling to me on the part 
of any of my friends because of marriage, I think hard. I 
would ask you, how can it be for Vernon’s good to quit an 
easy pleasant home for the wretched profession of Litera¬ 
ture ? — wretchedly paying, I mean,” he bowed to the 
authoress. “Let him leave the house, if he imagines he 
will not harmonize with its young mistress. He is queer, 
though a good fellow. But he ought, in that event, to 
have an establishment. And my scheme for Vernon — men, 
Miss Dale, do not change to their old friends when they 
marry — my scheme, which would cause the alteration in 
his system of life to be barely perceptible, is to build him 
a poetical little cottage, large enough for a couple, on the 
borders of my park. I have the spot in my eye. The 
point is, can he live alone there ? Men, I say, do not change. 
How is it that we cannot say the same of women ? 

Lsetitia remarked : “ The generic woman appears to have 
an extraordinary faculty for swallowing the individual.” 


138 


THE EGOISV 


* As to the individual, as to a particular person, I may be 
wrong. Precisely because it is her case I think of, my 
strong friendship inspires the fear: unworthy of both, no 
doubt, but trace it to the source. Even pure friendship, 
such is the taint in us, knows a kind of jealousy; though I 
would gladly see her established, and near me, happy and 
contributing to my happiness with her incomparable social 
charm. Her I do not estimate generically, be sure.” 

“If you do me the honour to allude to me, Sir Wil¬ 
loughby,” said Laetitia, “ I am my father’s housemate.” 

“ What wooer would take that for a refusal ? He would 
beg to be a third in the house and a sharer of your affec¬ 
tionate burden. Honestly, why not ? And I may be argu¬ 
ing against my own happiness : it may be the end of me ! ” 

“ The end ? ” 

“ Old friends are captious, exacting. Ho, not the end. 
Yet if my friend is not the same to me, it is the end to that 
form of friendship : not to the degree possibly. But when 
one is used to the form! And do you, in its application to 
friendship, scorn the word ‘use’? We are creatures of 
custom. I am, I confess, a poltroon in my affections; I 
dread changes. The shadow of the tenth of an inch in the 
customary elevation of an eyelid! — to give you an idea of 
my susceptibility. And, my dear Miss Dale, I throw myself 
on your charity, with all my weakness bare, let me add, as I 
cduld do to none but you. Consider, then, if I lose you! 
The fear is due to my pusillanimity entirely. High-souled 
women may be wives, mothers, and still reserve that home 
for their friend. They can and will conquer the viler con¬ 
ditions of human life. Our states, I have always contended, 
our various phases have to be passed through, and there 
is no disgrace in it so long as they do not levy toll on the 
quintessential, the spiritual element. You understand me ? 
I am no adept in these abstract elucidations.” 

“ You explain yourself clearly,” said Laetitia. 

“ I have never pretended that psychology was my forte,” 
said he, feeling overshadowed by her cold commendation: 
he was not less acutely sensitive to the fractional divisions 
of tones than of eyelids, being, as it were, a melody with 
which everything was out of tune that did not modestly or 
mutely accord; and to bear about a melody in your person 


SIR WILLOUGHBY AND L^TITIA 


139 


is incomparably more searching than the best of touchstones 
and talismans ever invented. “Your father’s health has 
improved latterly ? ” 

“ He did not complain of his health when I saw him this 
morning. My cousin Amelia is with him, and she is an 
excellent nurse.” 

“ He has a liking for Vernon.” 

“ He has a great respect for Mr. Whitford.” 

“You have ?” 

“Oh! yes; I have it equally.” 

“ For a foundation, that is the surest. I would have the 
friends dearest to me begin on that. The headlong match 
is ! — how can we describe it ? By its finale, I am afraid. 
Vernon’s abilities are really to be respected. His shyness 
is his malady. I suppose he reflected that he was not a 
capitalist. He might, one would think, have addressed 
himself to me; my purse is not locked.” 

“No, Sir Willoughby!” Laetitia said warmly, for his 
donations in charity were famous. 

Her eyes gave him the food he enjoyed, and basking in 
them, he continued, — 

“Vernon’s income would at once have been regulated 
commensurately with a new position requiring an increase. 
This money, money, money ! But the world will have it so. 
Happily I have inherited habits of business and personal 
economy. Vernon is a man who would do fifty times more 
with a companion appreciating his abilities and making 
light of his little deficiencies. They are palpable, small 
enough. He has always been aware of my wishes : — when 
perhaps the fulfilment might have sent me off on another 
tour of the world, home-bird though I am! When was it 
that our friendship commenced ? In my boyhood, I know. 
Very many years back.” 

“ I am in my thirtieth year,” said Laetitia. 

Surprised and pained by a baldness resembling the deeds 
of ladies (they have been known, either through absence of 
mind, or mania, to displace a wig) in the deadly intimacy 
which slaughters poetic admiration, Sir Willoughby pun¬ 
ished her by deliberately reckoning that she did not look 
less. 

“ Genius,” he observed, “ is unacquainted with wrinkles: ” 


140 


THE EGOIST 


hardly one of his prettiest speeches; but he had been 
wounded, and he never could recover immediately. Coming 
on him in a mood of sentiment, the wound was sharp. He 
could very well have calculated the lady’s age. It was the 
jarring clash of her brazen declaration of it upon his low 
rich flute-notes that shocked him. 

He glanced at the gold cathedral-clock on the mantel¬ 
piece, and proposed a stroll on the lawn before dinner. 
Laetitia gathered up her embroidery work. 

“ As a rule,” he said, “ authoresses are not needlewomen.” 

“ I shall resign the needle or the pen if it stamps me an 
exception,” she replied. 

He attempted a compliment on her truly exceptional 
character. As when the player’s finger rests in distraction 
on the organ, it was without measure and disgusted his own 
hearing. Nevertheless she had been so good as to diminish 
his apprehension that the marriage of a lady in her thirtieth 
year with his cousin Vernon would be so much of a loss to 
him; hence, while parading the lawn, now and then casting 
an eye at the window of the room where his Clara and 
Vernon were in council, the schemes he indulged for his 
prospective comfort and his feelings of the moment were in 
sueh striving harmony as that to which we hear orchestral 
musicians bringing their instruments under the process 
called tuning. It is not perfect, but it promises to be so 
soon. We are not angels, which have their dulcimers ever 
on the choral pitch. We are mortals, attaining the celestial 
accord with effort, through a stage of pain. Some degree of 
pain was necessary to Sir Willoughby, otherwise he would 
not have seen his generosity -confronting him. He grew, 
therefore, tenderly inclined to Laetitia once more, so far as 
to say within himself, “ For conversation she would be a 
valuable wife.” And this valuable wife he was presenting 
to his cousin. 

Apparently, considering the duration of the conference of 
his Clara and Vernon, his cousin required strong persuasion 
to accept the present. 


THE PETITION FOE A HELEASE 


141 


CHAPTER XV 

THE PETITION FOR A. RELEASE 

Neither Clara nor Vernon appeared at the mid-day table. 
Dr. Middleton talked with Miss Dale on classical matters, 
like a good-natured giant giving a child the jump from 
stone to stone across a brawling mountain ford, so that an 
unedified audience might really suppose, upon seeing her 
over the difficulty, she had done something for herself. Sir 
Willoughby was proud of her, and therefore anxious to 
settle her business while he was in the humour to lose her. 
He hoped to finish it by shooting a word or two at Vernon 
before dinner. Clara’s petition to be set free, released from 
him , had vaguely frightened even more than it offended his 
pride. 

Miss Isabel quitted the room. 

She came back, saying, “ They decline to lunch.” 

“ Then we may rise,” remarked Sir Willoughby. 

“ She was weeping,” Miss Isabel murmured to him. 

“ Girlish enough,” he said. 

The two elderly ladies went away together. Miss Dale, 
pursuing her theme with the Rev. Doctor, was invited by 
him to a course in the library. Sir Willoughby walked up 
and down the lawn, taking a glance at the West-room as he 
swung round on the turn of his leg. Growing impatient, 
he looked in at the window and found the room vacant. 

Nothing was to be seen of Clara and Vernon during the 
afternoon. Near the dinner-hour the ladies were informed 
by Miss Middleton’s maid that her mistress was lying down 
on her bed, too unwell with headache to be present. 
Young Cross jay brought a message from Vernon (delayed by 
birds’ eggs in the delivery), to say that he was off over the 
hills, and thought of dining with Dr. Corney. 

Sir Willoughby despatched condolences to his bride. He 
was not well able to employ his mind on its customary topic, 
being, like the dome of a bell, a man of so pervading a ring 
within himself concerning himself, that the recollection of a 
doubtful speech or unpleasant circumstance touching him 


142 


THE EGOIST 


closely, deranged his inward peace; and as dubious and 
unpleasant things will often occur, he had great need of a 
worshipper, and was often compelled to appeal to her for 
signs of antidotal idolatry. In this instance, when the 
need of a worshipper was sharply felt, he obtained no signs 
at all. The Bev. Doctor had fascinated Miss Dale; so that, 
both within and without, Sir Willoughby was uncomforted. 
His themes in public were those of an English gentleman; 
horses, dogs, game, sport, intrigue, scandal, politics, wines, 
the manly themes ; with a condescension to ladies’ tattle, 
and approbation of a racy anecdote. What interest could 
he possibly take in the Athenian Theatre and the girl whose 
flute-playing behind the scenes, imitating the nightingale, 
enraptured a Greek audience ! He would have suspected a 
motive in Miss Dale’s eager attentiveness, if the motive 
could have been conceived. Besides, the ancients were not 
decorous; they did not, as we make our moderns do, write 
for ladies. He ventured at the dinner-table to interrupt 
Dr. Middleton once, — 

“ Miss Dale will do wisely, I think, sir, by confining 
herself to your present edition of the classics.” 

“ That,” replied Dr. Middleton, “ is the observation of a 
student of the dictionary of classical mythology in the 
English tongue.” 

“ The Theatre is a matter of climate, sir. You will grant 
me that.” 

“If quick wits come of climate, it is as you say, sir.” 

“ With us it seems a matter of painful fostering, or the 
need of it,” said Miss Dale, with a question to Dr. Middle- 
ton, excluding Sir Willoughby, as though he had been a 
temporary disturbance of the flow of their dialogue. 

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel, previously excellent 
listeners to the learned talk, saw the necessity of coming 
to his rescue ; but you cannot converse with your aunts, 
inmates of your house, on general subjects at table; the 
attempt increased his discomposure ; he considered that he 
had ill-chosen his father-in-law; that scholars are an im¬ 
polite race; that young or youngish women are devotees 
of power in any form, and will be absorbed by a scholar for 
a variation of a man ; concluding that he must have a round 
of dinner-parties to friends, especially ladies, appreciating 


THE PETITION FOR A RELEASE 


143 


him, during the Doctor’s visit. Clara's headache above, and 
Dr. Middleton’s unmannerliness below, affected his instincts 
in a way to make him apprehend that a stroke of misfortune 
was impending; thunder was in the air. Still he learnt 
something, by which he was to profit subsequently. The 
topic of Wine withdrew the Doctor from his classics ; it was 
magical on him. A strong fraternity of taste was discovered 
in the sentiments of host and guest upon particular wines 
and vintages; they kindled one another by naming great 
years of the grape, and if Sir Willoughby had to sacrifice 
the ladies to the topic, he much regretted a condition of 
things that compelled him to sin against his habit, for the 
sake of being in the conversation and probing an elderly 
gentleman’s foible. 

Late at night he heard the house-bell, and meeting Vernon 
in the hall, invited him to enter the laboratory and tell him 
Dr. Corney’s last. Vernon was brief; Corney had not let 
fly a single anecdote, he said, and lighted his candle. 

“By the way, Vernon, you had a talk with Miss 
Middleton ? ” 

“ She will speak to you to-morrow at twelve." 

“ To-morrow at twelve ? ” 

“ It gives her four and twenty hours." 

Sir Willoughby determined that his perplexity should be 
seen; but Vernon said good night to him, and was shooting 
up the stairs before the dramatic exhibition of surprise had 
yielded to speech. 

Thunder was in the air and a blow coming. Sir Wil¬ 
loughby's instincts were awake to the many signs, nor, 
though silenced, were they hushed by his harping on the 
frantic excesses to which women are driven by the passion of 
jealousy. He believed in Clara’s jealousy because he really 
had intended to rouse it; under the form of emulation, feebly. 
He could not suppose she had spoken of it to Vernon. But 
as for the seriousness of her desire to be released from her 
engagement, that was little credible. Still the fixing of an 
hour for her to speak to him after an interval of four and 
twenty hours, left an opening for the incredible to add its 
weight to the suspicious mass : and who would have fancied 
Clara Middleton so wild a victim of the intemperate passion ! 
He muttered to himself several assuageing observations to 


144 


THE EGOIST 


excuse a young lady half-demented, and rejected them in a 
lump for their nonsensical inapplicability to Clara. In order 
to obtain some sleep, he consented to blame himself slightly, 
in the style of the enamoured historian of erring Beauties 
alluding to their peccadilloes. He had done it to edify her. 
Sleep, however, failed him. That an inordinate jealousy 
argued an overpowering love, solved his problem until he 
tried to fit the proposition to Clara’s character. He had 
discerned nothing southern in her. Latterly, with the 
blushing Day in prospect, she had contracted and frozen. 
There was no reading either of her or the mystery. 

In the morning, at the breakfast-table, a confession of 
sleeplessness was general. Excepting Miss Dale and Dr. 
Middleton, none had slept a wink. “I, sir,” the Doctor 
replied to Sir Willoughby, “ slept like a lexicon in your 
library when Mr. Whitford and I are out of it.” 

Vernon incidentally mentioned that he had been writing 
through the night. 

“You fellows kill yourselves,” Sir Willoughby reproved 
him. “For my part, I make it a principle to get through 
my work without self-slaughter.” 

Clara watched her father for a symptom of ridicule. He 
gazed mildly on the systematic worker. She was unable to 
guess whether she would have in him an ally or a judge. 
The latter, she feared. Now that she had embraced the 
strife, she saw the division of the line where she stood from 
that one where the world places girls who are affianced 
wives : her father could hardly be with her; it had gone too 
far. He loved her, but he would certainly take her to be 
moved by a maddish whim ; he would not try to understand 
her case. The scholar’s detestation of a disarrangement of 
human affairs that had been by miracle contrived to run 
smoothly, would of itself rank him against her; and with 
the world to back his view of her, he might behave like a 
despotic father. How could she defend herself before him ? 
At one thought of Sir Willoughby, her tongue made ready, 
and feminine craft was alert to prompt it; but to her father 
she could imagine herself opposing only dumbness and 
obstinacy. 

“ It is not exactly the same kind of work,” she said. 

Dr. Middleton rewarded her with a bushy eyebrow’s 


THE PETITION FOR A RELEASE 145 

beam of his revolving humour at the baronet’s notion of 
work. 

So little was needed to quicken her that she sunned her¬ 
self in the beam, coaxing her father’s eyes to stay with hers 
as long as she could, and beginning to hope he might be won 
to her side, if she confessed she had been more in the wrong 
than she felt; owned to him, that is, her error in not earlier 
disturbing his peace. 

“ I do not say it is the same,” observed Sir Willoughby, 
bowing to their alliance of opinion. “ My poor work is for 
the day, and Vernon’s, no doubt, for the day to come. I 
contend, nevertheless, for the preservation of health, as the 
chief implement of work.” 

“ Of continued work: there I agree with you,” said Dr. 
Middleton cordially. 

Clara’s heart sank; so little was needed to deaden her. 

Accuse her of an overweening antagonism to her be¬ 
trothed; yet remember that though the words had not been 
uttered to give her good reason for it, nature reads nature; 
captives may be stript of everything save that power to read 
their tyrant; remember also that she was not, as she well 
knew, blameless; her rage at him was partly against herself. 

The rising from table left her to Sir Willoughby. She 
swam away after Miss Dale, exclaiming: “ The laboratory ! 
Will you have me for a companion on your walk to see your 
father ? One breathes earth and heaven to-day out of doors. 
Is n’t it Summer with a Spring-breeze ? I will wander about 
your garden and not hurry your visit, I promise.” 

“ I shall be very happy indeed. But I am going immedi¬ 
ately,” said Laetitia, seeing Sir Willoughby hovering to snap 
up his bride. 

“ Yes ; and a garden-hat and I am on the march.” 

“I will wait for you on the terrace.” 

“ You will not have to wait.” 

“Five minutes at the most,” Sir Willoughby said to 
Laetitia, and she passed out, leaving them alone together. 

“ Well, and my love! ” he addressed his bride almost 
huggingly; “ and what is the story ? and how did you succeed 
with old Vernon yesterday ? He will and he won’t ? He’s 
a very woman in these affairs. I can’t forgive him for giv¬ 
ing you a headache. You were found weeping.” 


146 


THE EGOIST 


“ Yes, I cried,” said Clara. 

“And now tell me about it. You know, my dear girl, 
whether he does or does n’t, our keeping him somewhere in 
the neighbourhood — perhaps not in the house — that is the 
material point. It can hardly be necessary in these days to 
urge marriages on. I ’m sure the country is over . . . 
Most marriages ought to be celebrated with the funeral 
knell! ” 

“ I think so,” said Clara. 

“ It will come to this, that marriages of consequence, and 
none but those, will be hailed with joyful peals.” 

“ Do not say such things in public, Willoughby.” 

“ Only to you, to you ! Don’t think me likely to expose 
myself to the world. Well, and I sounded Miss Dale, 
and there will be no violent obstacle. And now about 
Vernon ? ” 

“ I will speak to you, Willoughby, when I return from 
my walk with Miss Dale, soon after twelve.” 

“ Twelve! ” said he. 

“ I name an hour. It seems childish. I can explain it. 
But it is named, I cannot deny, because I am a rather 
childish person perhaps, and have it prescribed to me to 
delay my speaking for a certain length of time. I may tell 
you at once that Mr. Whitford is not to be persuaded by me, 
and the breaking of our engagement would not induce him 
to remain.” 

“ Vernon used those words ? ” 

“It was I.” 

“‘The breaking of our engagement’! Come into the 
laboratory, my love.” 

“ I shall not have time.” 

“ Time shall stop rather than interfere with our conversa¬ 
tion ! ‘ The breaking . . .’! but it’s a sort of sacrilege to 

speak of it.” 

“ That I feel; yet it has to be spoken of.” 

“Sometimes? Why? I can’t conceive the occasion. 
You know, to me, Clara, plighted faith, the affiancing of 
two lovers, is a piece of religion. I rank it as holy as 
marriage; nay, to me it is holier; I really cannot tell you 
how ; 1 can only appeal to you in your bosom to understand 
me. We read of divorces with conmarative indifference. 


THE PETITION FOR A RELEASE 147 

They occur between couples who have rubbed off all 
romance.” 

She could have asked him in her fit of ironic iciness, on 
hearing him thus blindly challenge her to speak out, whether 
the romance might be his piece of religion. 

He propitiated the more unwarlike sentiments in her by 
ejaculating: “ Poor souls ! let them go their several ways. 
Married people no longer lovers are in the category of the 
unnameable. But the hint of the breaking of an engage¬ 
ment — our engagement! — between us ? Oh ! ” 

“ Oh ! ” Clara came out with a swan’s note swelling ovei 
mechanical imitation of him to dolorousness illimitable. 
“ Oh ! ” she breathed short, “ let it be now. Do not speak, 
till you have heard me. My head may not be clear by-and- 
by. And two scenes — twice will be beyond my endurance. 
I am penitent for the wrong I have done you. I grieve for 
you. All the blame is mine. Willoughby, you must release 
me. Do not let me hear a word of that word; jealousy is 
unknown to me . . . Happy if I could call you friend and 
see you with a worthier than I, who might by-and-by call 
me friend! You have my plighted troth . . . given in 
ignorance of my feelings. Reprobate a weak and foolish 
girl’s ignorance. I have thought of it, and I cannot see 
wickedness, though the blame is great, shameful. You have 
none. You are without any blame. You will not suffer as 
I do. You will be generous to me ? I have no respect for 
myself when I beg you to be generous and release me.” 

“But this was the ...” Willoughby preserved his 
calmness, “ this, then, the subject of your interview with 
Vernon ? ” 

“I have spoken to him. I did my commission, and I 
spoke to him.” 

“ Of me ? ” 

“ Of myself. I see how I hurt you; I could not avoid it. 
Ye s, of you, as far as we are related. I said I believed you 
would release me. I said I could be true to my plighted 
word, but that you would not insist. Could a gentleman 
insist ? But not a step beyond; not love; I have none. 
And, Willoughby, treat me as one perfectly worthless; I 
am. I should have known it a year back. I was deceived 
in myself. There should be love.” 


148 


THE EGOIST 


“ Should be ! ” Willoughby’s tone was a pungent com¬ 
ment on her. 

“ Love, then, I find I have not. I think I am antagonis¬ 
tic to it. What people say of it I have not experienced. I 
find I was mistaken. It is lightly said, but very painful. 
You understand me, that my prayer is for liberty, that I 
may not be tied. If you can release and pardon me, or 
promise ultimately to pardon me, or say some kind word, I 
shall know it is because I am beneath you utterly that I 
have been unable to give you the love you should have with 
a wife. Only say to me, go! It is you who break the 
match, discovering my want of a heart. What people think 
of me matters little. My anxiety will be to save you 
annoyance.” 

She waited for him : he seemed on the verge of speaking. 

He perceived her expectation; he had nothing but clown¬ 
ish tumult within, and his dignity counselled him to dis¬ 
appoint her. 

Swaying his head, like the oriental palm whose shade is 
a blessing to the perfervid wanderer below, smiling gravely, 
he was indirectly asking his dignity what he could say to 
maintain it and deal this mad young woman a bitterly com¬ 
passionate rebuke. What to think, hung remoter. The 
thing to do struck him first. 

He squeezed both her hands, threw the door wide open, 
and said, with countless blinkings: “ In the laboratory we 
are uninterrupted. I was at a loss to guess where that most 
unpleasant effect on the senses came from. They are always 
‘guessing’ through the nose. I mean, the remainder of 
breakfast here. Perhaps I satirized them too smartly — if 
you know the letters. When they are not ‘calculating.’ 
More offensive than debris of a midnight banquet! An 
American tour is instructive, though not so romantic. Not 
so romantic as Italy, I mean. Let us escape.” 

She held back from his arm. She had scattered his 
brains; it was pitiable: but she was in the torrent and 
could not suffer a pause or a change of place. 

“ It must be here ; one minute more — I cannot go else¬ 
where to begin again. Speak to me here; answer my 
request. Once; one word. If you forgive me, it will be 
superhuman. But, release me.” 


THE PETITION FOR A RELEASE 149 

“Seriously,” he rejoined, “tea-cups and coffee-cups, 
bread-crumbs, egg-shells, caviare, butter, beef, bacon! Can 
we ? The room reeks.” 

“ Then I will go for my walk with Miss Dale. And you 
will speak to me when I return ? ” 

“At all seasons. You shall go with Miss Dale. But, 
my dear! my love! Seriously, where are we ? One hears 
of lover’s quarrels. Now, I never quarrel. It is a char¬ 
acteristic of mine. And you speak of me to my cousin 
Vernon! Seriously, plighted faith signifies plighted faith, 
as much as an iron-cable is iron to hold by. Some little 
twist of the mind ? To Vernon, of all men! Tush ! she 
has been dreaming of a hero of perfection, and the com¬ 
parison is unfavourable to her Willoughby. But, my Clara, 
when I say to you, that bride is bride, and you are mine, 
mine! ” 

“ Willoughby, you mentioned them,—those separations 
of two married. You said, if they do not love ... Oh! 
say, is it not better . . . instead of later ? ” 

He took advantage of her modesty in speaking to exclaim : 
“ Where are we now ? Bride is bride, and wife is wife, and 
affianced is, in honour, wedded. You cannot be released. 
We are united. Recognize it: united. There is no possi 
bility of releasing a wife ! ” 

“ Not if she ran ? . . .” 

This was too direct to be histrionically misunderstood. 
He had driven her to the extremity of more distinctly 
imagining the circumstance she had cited, and with that 
cleared view the desperate creature gloried in launching 
such a bolt at the man’s real or assumed insensibility as 
must, by shivering it, waken him. 

But in a moment she stood in burning rose, with dimmed 
eyesight. She saw his horror, and seeing shared it ; shared 
just then only by seeing it; which led her to rejoice with 
the deepest of sighs that some shame was left in her. 

“ Ran ? ran ? ran ? ” he said as rapidly as he blinked. 
“How ? where ? what idea? . • .” 

Close was be upon an explosion that would have sullied 
his conception of the purity of the younger members of the 
sex hauntingly. 

That she, a young lady, maiden, of strictest education, 


150 


THE EGOIST 


should, and without his teaching, know that wives ran! — 
know that by running they compelled their husbands to 
abandon pursuit, surrender possession! — and that she 
should suggest it of herself as a wife ! — that she should 
speak of running! — 

His ideal, the common male Egoist ideal of a waxwork 
sex, would have been shocked to fragments had she spokes, 
further to fill in the outlines of these awful interjections. 

She was tempted: for during the last few minutes the fire 
of her situation had enlightened her understanding upon a 
subject far from her as the ice-fields of the North a short 
while before ; and the prospect offered to her courage if she 
would only outstare shame and seem at home in the doings 
of wickedness, was his loathing and dreading so vile a young 
woman. She restrained herself ; chiefly, after the first 
bridling of maidenly timidity, because she could not bear 
to lower the idea of her sex even in his esteem. 

The door was open. She had thoughts of flying out to 
breathe in an interval of truce. 

She reflected on her situation hurriedly askance,— 

“ If one must go through this, to be disentangled from an 
engagement, what must it be to poor women seeking to be 
free of a marriage ? ” 

Had she spoken it, Sir Willoughby might have learnt that 
she was not so iniquitously wise of the things of this world 
as her mere sex’s instinct, roused to the intemperateness of 
a creature struggling with fetters, had made her appear in 
her dash to seize a weapon, indicated moreover by him. 

Clara took up the old broken vow of women to vow it 
afresh: “ Never to any man will I give my hand.” 

She replied to Sir Willoughby : “ I have said all. I can¬ 
not explain what I have said.” 

She had heard a step in the passage. Vernon entered. 

Perceiving them, he stated his mission in apology: “ Dr. 
Middleton left a book in this room. I see it; it’s a 
Heinsius.” 

“ Ha! by the way, a book; books would not be left here 
if they were not brought here, with my compliments to Dr. 
Middleton, who may do as he pleases, though seriously 
order is order,” said Sir Willoughby. “ Come away to the 
laboratory, Clara. It’s a comment on human beings that 


THE PETITION FOR A RELEASE 


151 


wherever they have been there ’s a mess, and you admirers 
of them,” he divided a sickly nod between Vernon and the 
stale breakfast-table, “must make what you can of it. 
Come, Clara.” 

Clara protested that she was engaged to walk with Miss 
Dale. 

“ Miss Dale is waiting in the hall,” said Vernon. 

“ Miss Dale is waiting,” said Clara. 

“ Walk with Miss Dale ; walk with Miss Dale,” Sir 
Willoughby remarked pressingly. “ I will beg her to wait 
another two minutes. You shall find her in the hall when 
you come down.” 

He rang the bell and went out. 

“ Take Miss Dale into your confidence ; she is quite trust¬ 
worthy,” Vernon said to Clara. 

“I have not advanced one step,” she replied. 

“Recollect that you are in a position of your own 
choosing ; and if, after thinking over it, you mean to escape 
you must make up your mind to pitched battles, and not be 
dejected if you are beaten in all of them; there is your only 
chance.” 

“Not my choosing; do not say choosing, Mr. Whit- 
ford. I did not choose. I was incapable of really choosing. 
I consented.” 

“ It’s the same in fact. But be sure of what you wish.” 

“ Yes,” she assented, taking it for her just punishment 
that she should be supposed not quite to know her wishes. 
“Your advice has helped me to-day.” 

“Did I advise?” 

“ Do you regret advising ? ” 

“ I should certainly regret a word that intruded between 
you and him.” 

“But you will not leave the Hall yet? You will not 
leave me without a friend ? If papa and I were to leave to¬ 
morrow, I foresee endless correspondence. I have to stay 
at least some days, and wear through it, and then, if I have 
to speak to my poor father you can imagine the effect on 
him.” 

Sir Willoughby came striding in, to correct the error of 
his going out. 

“ Miss Dale awaits you, my dear. You have bonnet, hat ? 


152 


THE EGOIST 


— No ? Have you forgotten your appointment to walk 
with her ? ” 

“ I am ready,” said Clara, departing. 

The two gentlemen behind her separated in the passage. 
They had not spoken. 

She had read of the reproach upon women, that they 
divide the friendships of men. She reproached herself, but 
she was in action, driven by necessity, between sea and rock. 
Dreadful to think of ! she was one of the creatures who are 
written about. 


CHAPTER XVI 

CLARA AND LA5TITIA 

In spite of his honourable caution, Vernon had said things 
to render Miss Middleton more angrily determined than she 
had been in the scene with Sir Willoughby. His counting 
on pitched battles and a defeat for her in all of them, made 
her previous feelings appear slack in comparison with the 
energy of combat now animating her. And she could 
vehemently declare that she had not chosen ; she was too 
young, too ignorant to choose. He had wrongly used that 
word; it sounded malicious; and to call consenting the 
same in fact as choosing, was wilfully unjust. Mr. Whit- 
ford meant well; he was conscientious, very conscientious. 
But he was not the hero descending from heaven bright- 
swordedto smite a woman’s fetters off her limbs and deliver 
her from the yawning mouth-abyss. 

His logical coolness of expostulation with her when she 
cast aside the silly mission entrusted to her by Sir Willough¬ 
by and wept for herself, was unheroic in proportion to its 
praiseworthiness. He had left it to her to do everything she 
wished done, stipulating simply that there should be a pause 
of four and twenty hours for her to consider of it before 
she proceeded in the attempt to extricate herself. Of con¬ 
solation there had not been a word. Said he, “ I am the 
last man to give advice in such a case.” Yet she had by no 
means astonished him when her confession came out It 



CLARA AND LASTITIA 


158 


came out, she knew not how. It was led up to by his de¬ 
clining the idea of marriage, and her congratulating him on 
his exemption from the prospect of the yoke, but memory 
was too dull to revive the one or two fiery minutes of 
broken language when she had been guilty of her dire 
misconduct. 

This gentleman was no flatterer, scarcely a friend. He 
could look on her grief without soothing her. Supposing 
he had soothed her warmly ? All her sentiments collected 
in her bosom to dash in reprobation of him at the thought. 
She nevertheless condemned him for his excessive coolness ; 
his transparent anxiety not to be compromised by a syllable ; 
his air of saying, “ I guessed as much, but why plead your 
case to me ? ” And his recommendation to her to be quite 
sure she did know what she meant, was a little insulting. 
She exonerated him from the intention; he treated her as 
a girl. By what he said of Miss Dale, he proposed that 
lady for imitation. 

“ I must be myself or I shall be playing hypocrite to dig 
my own pitfall,” she said to herself, while taking counsel 
with Lsetitia as to the route for their walk, and admiring a 
becoming curve in her companion's hat. 

Sir Willoughby, with many protestations of regret that 
letters of business debarred him from the pleasure of accom¬ 
panying them, remarked upon the path proposed by Miss 
Dale: “ In that case you must have a footman.” 

“Then we adopt the other,” said Clara, and they set 
forth. 

“ Sir Willoughby,” Miss Dale said to her, “ is always in 
alarm about our unprotectedness.” 

Clara glanced up at the clouds and closed her parasol. 
She replied, “It inspires timidity.” 

There was that in the accent and character of the answer 
which warned Lsetitia to expect the reverse of a quiet 
chatter with Miss Middleton. 

“ You are fond of walking ? ” She chose a peaceful 
topic. 

“ Walking or riding; yes, of walking,” said Clara. “ The 
difficulty is to find companions.” 

“We shall lose Mr. Whitford next week.” 

“ He goes ? ” 


154 


THE EGOIST 


“ He will be a great loss to me, for I do not ride,” Laetitia 
replied to the off-hand inquiry. 

“ Ah ! ” 

Miss Middleton did not fan conversation when she simply 
breathed her voice. 

Laetitia tried another neutral theme. 

“ The weather to-day suits our country,” she said. 

“ England, or Patterne Park ? I am so devoted to moun¬ 
tains that I have no enthusiasm for flat land.” 

" Do you call our country flat, Miss Middleton ? We have 
undulations, hills, and we have sufficient diversity, meadows, 
rivers, copses, brooks, and good roads, and pretty by-paths.” 

“ The prettiness is overwhelming. It is very pretty to 
see; but to live with, I think I prefer ugliness. I can 
imagine learning to love ugliness. It’s honest. However 
young you are, you cannot be deceived by it. These parks 
of rich people are a part of the prettiness. I would rather 
have fields, commons.” 

“ The parks give us delightful green walks, paths through 
beautiful woods.” 

“ If there is a right of way for the public.” 

“ There should be,” said Miss Dale, wondering; and Clara 
cried: “ I chafe at restraint ; hedges and palings every¬ 
where ! I should have to travel ten years to sit down 
contented among these fortifications. Of course I can read 
of this rich kind of English country with pleasure in poetry. 
But it seems to me to require poetry. What would you say 
of human beings requiring it ? ” 

“ That they are not so companionable but that the haze of 
distance improves the view.” 

“ Then you do know that you are the wisest! ” 

Laetitia raised her dark eyelashes; she sought to under¬ 
stand. She could only fancy she did; and if she did, it 
meant that Miss Middleton thought her wise in remaining 
single. 

Clara was full of a sombre preconception that her “ jeal¬ 
ousy ” had been hinted to Miss Dale. 

“ You knew Miss Durham ? ” she said. 

“ Not intimately.” 

“ As well as you know me ? ” 

“ Not so well.” 


CLARA AND LALTITIA 


155 


“ But you saw more of her ? ” 

u She was more reserved with me.” 

“ Oh ! Miss Dale, I would not be reserved with you.” 

The thrill of the voice caused Lsetitia to steal a look. 
Clara’s eyes were bright, and she had the readiness to run 
to volubility of the fever-stricken; otherwise she did not 
betray excitement. 

“You will never allow any of these noble trees to be 
felled, Miss Middleton.” 

“ The axe is better than decay, do you not think ? ” 

“ I think your influence will be great and always used to 
good purpose.” 

“ My influence, Miss Dale ? I have begged a favour this 
morning and cannot obtain the grant.” 

It was lightly said, but Clara’s face was more significant, 
and “ What ? ” leapt from Laetitia’s lips. 

Before she could excuse herself, Clara had answered, 
“My liberty.” 

In another and higher tone Laetitia said : “ What ? ” 

and she looked round on her companion ; she looked in 
doubt that is open to conviction by a narrow aperture, and 
slowly and painfully yields access. Clara saw the vacancy 
of her expression gradually filling with woefulness. 

“I have begged him to release me from my engagement, 
Miss Dale.” 

“ Sir Willoughby ? ” 

“ It is incredible to you. He refuses. You see I have 
no influence.” 

“ Miss Middleton, it is terrible ! ” 

“To be dragged to the marriage service against one’s 
will? Yes.” 

“ Oh ! Miss Middleton.” 

“ Do you not think so ? ” 

“ That cannot be your meaning.” 

“ You do not suspect me of trifling ? You know I would 
not. I am as much in earnest as a mouse in a trap.” 

“ No, you will not misunderstand me ! Miss Middleton, 
such a blow to Sir Willoughby would be shocking, most 
cruel! He is devoted to you.” 

“ He was devoted to Miss Durham.” 

“Not so deeply : differently.” 


156 


THE EGOIST 


“ Was lie not very much courted at that time ? He is 
now ; not so much: he is not so young. But my reason for 
speaking of Miss Durham was to exclaim at the strangeness 
of a girl winning her freedom to plunge into wedlock. Is it 
comprehensible to you ? She flies from one dungeon into 
another. These are the acts which astonish men at our 
conduct, and cause them to ridicule and, I daresay, de¬ 
spise us.” 

“ But, Miss Middleton, for Sir Willoughby to grant such 
a request, if it was made . . . ” 

“ It was made, and by me, and will be made again. I 
throw it all on my unworthiness, Miss Dale. So the county 
will think of me, and quite justly. I would rather defend 
him than myself. He requires a different wife from any¬ 
thing I can be. That is my discovery ; unhappily a late 
one. The blame is all mine. The world cannot be too hard 
on me. But I must be free if I am to be kind in my judge¬ 
ments even of the gentleman I have injured.” 

“ So noble a gentleman ! ” Lsetitia sighed. 

“ I will subscribe to any eulogy of him,” said Clara, with 
a penetrating thought as to the possibility of a lady expe¬ 
rienced in him likeLgetitia taking him for noble. “ He has 
a noble air. I say it sincerely, that your appreciation of 
him proves his nobility.” Her feeling of opposition to Sir 
Willoughby pushed her to this extravagance, gravely per¬ 
plexing Laetitia. “And it is,” added Clara, as if to support 
what she had said, “ a withering rebuke to me ; I know him 
less, at least have not had so long an experience of him.” 

Laetitia pondered on an obscurity in these words which 
would have accused her thick intelligence but for- a glimmer 
it threw on another most obscure communication. She 
feared it might be, strange though it seemed, jealousy, a 
shade of jealousy affecting Miss Middleton, as had been 
vaguely intimated by Sir Willoughby when they were wait¬ 
ing in the hall. “ A little feminine ailment, a want of 
comprehension of a perfect friendship; ” those were his 
words to her: and he suggested vaguely that care must be 
taken in the eulogy of her friend. 

She resolved to be explicit. 

“ I have not said that I think him beyond criticism, Miss 
Middleton.” 


CLARA AND L^ETITIA 


157 


“ Noble ? ” 

“ He has faults. When we have known a person for 
years the faults come out, but custom makes light of them ; 
and I suppose we feel flattered by seeing what it would be 
difficult to be blind to ! A very little flatters us! — Now, 
do you not admire that view ? It is my favourite.” 

Clara gazed over rolling richness of foliage, wood and 
water, and church spire, a town and horizon hills. There 
sang a sky-lark. 

“ Not even the bird that does not fly away! ” she said; 
meaning, she had no heart for the bird satisfied to rise and 
descend in this place. 

Laetitia travelled to some notion, dim and immense, of 
Miss Middleton’s fever of distaste. She shrank from it in 
a kind of dread lest it might be contagious and rob her of 
her one ever-fresh possession of the homely picturesque; 
but Clara melted her by saying: “ For your sake I could 
love it ... in time; or some dear old English scene. 
Since . . . since this . . . this change in me, I find I 
cannot separate landscape from associations. Now I learn 
how youth goes. I have grown years older in a week. — 
Miss Dale, if he were to give me my freedom ? if he were 
to cast me off ? if he stood alone ? ” 

“I should pity him.” 

“ Him — not me! Oh! right. I hoped you would; I 
knew you would.” 

Laetitia’s attempt to shift Miss Middleton’s shiftiness 
was vain; for now she seemed really listening to the lan¬ 
guage of jealousy: — jealous of the ancient Letty Dale! — 
and immediately before, the tone was quite void of it. 

“ Yes,” she said, “but you make me feel myself in the 
dark, and when I do I have the habit of throwing myself 
for guidance upon such light as I have within. You shall 
know me, if you will, as well as I know myself. And do 
not think me far from the point when I say I have a 
feeble health. I am what the doctors call anaemic; a 
rather bloodless creature. The blood is life, so I have not 
much life. Ten years back — eleven, if I must be precise, 
I thought of conquering the world with a pen! The result 
is that I am glad of a fireside, and not sure of always 
having one: and that is my achievement. My days are 


158 


THE EGOIST 


monotonous, but if I have a dread, it is that there will be 
an alteration in them. My father has very little money. 
We subsist on what private income he has, and his pen¬ 
sion : he was an army doctor. I may by-and-by have to 
live in a town for pupils. I could be grateful to any one 
who would save me from that. I should be astonished at 
his choosing to have me burden his household as well. — 
Have I now explained the nature of my pity ? It would 
be the pity of common sympathy, pure lymph of pity, 
as nearly disembodied as can be. Last year’s sheddings 
from the tree do not form an attractive garland. Their 
merit is, that they have not the ambition. I am like them. 
Now, Miss Middleton, I cannot make myself more bare 
to you. I hope you see my sincerity.” 

“I do see it,” Clara said. 

With the second heaving of her heart, she cried: “See 
it, and envy you that humility! proud if I could ape it! 
Oh! how proud if I could speak so truthfully true! — You 
would not have spoken so to me without some good feeling 
out of which friends are made. That I am sure of. To 
be very truthful to a person, one must have a liking. So 
I judge by myself. Do I presume too much?” 

Kindness was on Laetitia’s face. 

“But now,” said Clara, swimming on the wave in her 
bosom, “I tax you with the silliest suspicion ever enter¬ 
tained by one of your rank. Lady, you have deemed me 
capable of the meanest of our vices! — Hold this hand, 
Laetitia, my friend, will you ? Something is going on in 
me.” 

Laetitia took her hand, and saw and felt that something 
was going on. 

Clara said: “You are a woman.” 

It was her effort to account for the something. 

She swam for a brilliant instant on tears, and yielded 
to the overflow. 

When they had fallen, she remarked upon her first long 
l >reath quite coolly: “ An encouraging picture of a rebel, 
is it not ? ” 

Her companion murmured to soothe her. 

“It’s little, it’s nothing,” said Clara, pained to keep her 
lips in line. 


CLARA AND LiETITIA 159 

They walked forward, holding hands, deep-hearted to 
one another. 

“I like this country better now,” the shaken girl re¬ 
sumed. “I could lie down in it and ask only for sleep. 
I should like to think of you here. How nobly self- 
respecting you must be, to speak as you did ! Our dreams 
of heroes and heroines are cold glitter beside the reality. 
I have been lately thinking of myself as an outcast of my 
sex, and to have a good woman liking me a little . . . 
loving ? Oh! Lsetitia, my friend, I should have kissed you, 
and not made this exhibition of myself — and if you call 
it hysterics, woe to you! for I bit my tongue to keep it off 
when I had hardly strength to bring my teeth together —• 
if that idea of jealousy had not been in your head. You 
ha 1 it from him.” 

“ I have not alluded to it in any word that I can recollect.” 

“ He can imagine no other cause for my wish to be re¬ 
leased. I have noticed, it is his instinct to reckon on 
women as constant by their nature. They are the needles, 
and he the magnet. Jealousy of you, Miss Dale! 
Lsetitia, may I speak?” 

“Say everything you please.” 

“I could wish: — Do you know my baptismal name?” 

“Clara.” 

“At last! I could wish . . . that is, if it were your 
wish. Yes, I could wish that. Next to independence, my 
wish would be that. I risk offending you. Do not let 
your delicacy take arms against me. I wish him happy in 
the only way that he can be made happy. There is my 
jealousy.” 

“ Was it what you were going to say just now ? ” 

“No.” 

“I thought not.” 

“ I was going to say — and I believe the rack would not 
make me truthful like you, Lsetitia — well, has it ever 
struck you: remember, I do see his merits; I speak to 
his faithfullest friend, and I acknowledge he is attractive, 
he has manly tastes and habits; but has it never struck 
you ... I have no right to ask; I know that men must 
have faults, I do not expect them to be saints; I am not 
one; I wish I were.” 


160 


THE EGOIST 


“Has it never struck me . . .?” Lsetitia prompted 
her. 

“ That very few women are able to be straightforwardly 
sincere in their speech, however much they may desire to 
be?” 

“They are differently educated. Great misfortune 
brings it to them.” 

“I am sure your answer is correct. Have you ever 
known a woman who was entirely an Egoist ? ” 

“Personally known one ? We are not better than men.” 

“ I do not pretend that we are. I have latterly become 
an Egoist, thinking of no one but myself, scheming to 
make use of every soul I meet. But then, women are in 
the position of inferiors. They are hardly out of the 
nursery when a lasso is round their necks; and if they 
have beauty, no wonder they turn it to a weapon and make 
as many captives as they can. I do not wonder! My 
sense of shame at my natural weakness and the arrogance 
of men would urge me to make hundreds captive, if that 
is being a coquette. I should not have compassion for 
those lofty birds, the hawks. To see them with their 
wings clipped would amuse me. Is there any other way 
of punishing them?” 

“Consider what you lose in punishing them.” 

“I consider what they gain if we do not.” 

Lsetitia supposed she was listening to discursive obser¬ 
vations upon the inequality in the relations of the sexes. 
A suspicion of a drift to a closer meaning had been lulled, 
and the colour flooded her swiftly when Clara said: “ Here 
is the difference I see; I see it; I am certain of it: women 
who are called coquettes make their conquests not of the 
best of men; but men who are Egoists have good women 
for their victims; women on whose devoted constancy 
they feed; they drink it like blood. I am sure I am not 
taking the merely feminine view. They punish them¬ 
selves too by passing over the one suitable to them, who 
could really give them what they crave to have, and they 
go where they ...” Clara stopped. “I have not your 
power to express ideas,” she said. 

“Miss Middleton, you have a dreadful power,” said 
Lsetitia. 


THE PORCELAIN VASE 161 

Clara smiled affectionately: “I am not aware of any. 
Whose cottage is this ? ” 

“My father’s. Will you not come in? into the 
garden ? ” 

Clara took note of ivied windows and roses in the porch. 
She thanked Laetitia and said, “ I will call for you in an 
hour.” 

“Are you walking on the road alone?” said Laetitia 
incredulously, with an eye to Sir Willoughby’s dismay. 

“I put my trust in the highroad,” Clara replied, and 
turned away, but turned back to Laetitia and offered her 
face to be kissed. 

The “ dreadful power ” of this young lady had fervently 
impressed Laetitia, and in kissing her she marvelled at her 
gentleness and girlishness. 

Clara walked on, unconscious of her possession of power 
of any kind. 


CHAPTER XVII 

THE PORCELAIN VASE 

During the term of Clara’s walk with Laetitia, Sir Wil¬ 
loughby’s shrunken self-esteem, like a garment hung to 
the fire after exposure to tempestuous weather, recovered 
some of the sleekness of its velvet pile in the society of 
Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, who represented to him the 
world he feared and tried to keep sunny for himself by all 
the arts he could exercise. She expected him to be the 
gay Sir Willoughby, and her look being as good as an 
incantation-summons, he produced the accustomed sprite, 
giving her sally for sally. Queens govern the polite. 
Popularity with men, serviceable as it is for winning 
favouritism with women, is of poor value to a sensitive 
gentleman, anxious even to prognostic apprehension on be¬ 
half of his pride, his comfort, and his prevalence. And 
men are grossly purchaseable; good wines have them, good 
cigars, a goodfellow air: they are never quite worth their 
salt even then; you can make head against their ill looks. 



162 


THE EGOIST 


But the looks of women will at one blow work on you the 
downright difference which is between the cock of lordly 
plume and the moulting. Happily they may be gained: 
a clever tongue will gain them, a leg. They are with you 
to a certainty if Nature is with you; if you are elegant 
and discreet: if the sun is on you, and they see you shin¬ 
ing in it; or if they have seen you well-stationed and 
handsome in the sun. And once gained, they are your 
mirrors for life, and far more constant than the glass. 
That tale of their caprice is absurd. Hit their imagina¬ 
tions once, they are your slaves, only demanding common 
courtier service of you. They will deny that you are age¬ 
ing, they will cover you from scandal, they will refuse to 
see you ridiculous. Sir Willoughby’s instinct, or skin, or 
outfloating feelers told him of these mysteries of the 
influence of the sex; he had as little need to study them 
as a lady breathed on. 

He had some need to know them, in fact; and with him 
the need of a protection for himself called it forth; he 
was intuitively a conjuror in self-defence, long-sighted, 
wanting no directions to the herb he was to suck at when 
fighting a serpent. His dulness of vision into the heart 
of his enemy was compensated by the agile sensitiveness 
obscuring but rendering him miraculously active, and with¬ 
out supposing his need immediate, he deemed it politic to 
fascinate Mrs. Mountstuart and anticipate ghastly possi¬ 
bilities in the future by dropping a hint; not of Clara’s 
fickleness, you maybe sure; of his own, rather; or more 
justly, of an altered view of Clara’s character. He 
touched oo the rogue in 'porcelain. 

Set gently laughing by his relishing humour: “I get 
nearer to it,” he said. 

“ Remember, I’m in love with her,” said Mrs. Mount¬ 
stuart. 

“That is our penalty.” 

“A pleasant one for you.” 

He assented. “ Is the ‘ rogue ' to be eliminated ? ” 

“Ask, when she’s a mother, my dear Sir Willoughby.” 

“ This is how I read you: — ” 

“I shall accept any interpretation that is complimem 
tary.” 


THE PORCELAIN VASE 163 

“Not one will satisfy me of being sufficiently so, and so 
I leave it to the character to fill out the epigram.” 

“ Do. What hurry is there ? And don’t be misled by 
your objection to rogue; which would be reasonable if you 
iiad not secured her.” 

The door of a hollow chamber of horrible reverberation 
was opened within him by this remark. 

He tried to say in jest, that it was not always a passion¬ 
ate admiration that held the rogue fast; but he muddled 
it in the thick of his conscious thunder, and Mrs. Mount- 
stuart smiled to see him shot from the smooth-flowing 
dialogue into the cataracts by one simple reminder to the 
lover of his luck. Necessarily after a fall, the pitch of 
their conversation relaxed. 

“Miss Dale is looking well,” he said. 

“Fairly: she ought to marry,” said Mrs. Mountstuart. 

He shook his head. “Persuade her.” 

She nodded: “Example may have some effect.” 

He looked extremely abstracted. “Yes, it is time. 
Where is the man you could recommend for her comple¬ 
ment ? She has now what was missing before, a ripe in¬ 
telligence in addition to her happy disposition — romantic, 
you would say. I can’t think women the worse for that.” 

“A dash of it.” 

“ She calls it ‘ leafage. ’ ” 

“Very pretty. And have you relented about your horse 
Achmet ? ” 

“I don’t sell him under four hundred.” 

“Poor Johnny Busshe! You forget that his wife doles 
him out his money. You ’re a hard bargainer, Sir Wil¬ 
loughby.” 

“I mean the price to be prohibitive.” 

“Very well; and ‘ leafage ’ is good for hide and seek; 
especially when there is no rogue in ambush. And that’s 
the worst I can say of Laetitia Dale. An exaggerated 
devotion is the scandal of our sex. They say you ’re the 
hardest man of business in the county too, and I can be¬ 
lieve it; for at home and abroad your aim is to get the 
best of everybody. You see I ’ve no leafage, I am per¬ 
fectly matter-of-fact, bald.” 

“Nevertheless, my dear Mrs. Mountstuart, I can assure 


164 


THE EGOIST 


you that conversing with you has much the same exhila¬ 
rating effect on me as conversing with Miss Dale.” 

“But, leafage! leafage! You hard bargainers have no 
compassion for devoted spinsters.” 

“I tell you my sentiments absolutely.” 

“And you have mine moderately expressed.” 

She recollected the purpose of her morning’s visit, which 
was to engage Dr. Middleton to dine with her, and Sir 
Willoughby conducted her to the library door. “Insist,” 
he said. 

Awaiting her reappearance, the refreshment of the talk 
he had sustained, not without point, assisted him to dis¬ 
tinguish in its complete abhorrent orb the offence com¬ 
mitted against him by his bride. And this he did through 
projecting it more and more away from him, so that in the 
outer distance it involved his personal emotions less, while 
observation was enabled to compass its vastness, and, as 
it were, perceive the whole spherical mass of the wretched 
girl’s guilt impudently turning on its axis. 

Thus to detach an injury done to us, and plant it in 
space, for mathematical measurement of its weight and 
bulk, is an art; it may also be an instinct of self- 
preservation; otherwise, as when mountains crumble adja¬ 
cent villages are crushed, men of feeling may at any 
moment be killed outright by the iniquitous and the cal¬ 
lous. But, as an art, it should be known to those who are 
for practising an art so beneficent, that circumstances must 
lend their aid. Sir Willoughby’s instinct even had sat 
dull and crushed before his conversation with Mrs. Mount- 
stuart. She lifted him to one of his ideals of himself. 
Among gentlemen he was the English gentleman; with 
ladies his aim was the Gallican courtier of any period 
from Louis Treize to Louis Quinze. He could doat on 
those who led him to talk in that character — backed by 
English solidity, you understand. Boast beef stood 
eminent behind the souffle and champagne. An English 
squire excelling his fellows at hazardous leaps in public, 
he was additionally a polished whisperer, a lively dia¬ 
logue^ one for witty bouts, with something in him — 
capacity for a drive and dig or two — beyond mere wit, 
as they soon learnt who called up his reserves, and had a 


THE PORCELAIN V^SE 


165 


bosom for pinking. So much for his ideal of himself. 
Now, Clara not only never evoked, never responded to it, 
she repelled it; there was no flourishing of it near her. 
He considerately overlooked these facts in his ordinary 
calculations; he was a man of honour and she was a girl of 
beauty; but the accidental blossoming of his ideal, with 
Mrs. Mountstuart, on the very heels of Clara’s offence, 
restored him to full command of his art of detachment, and 
he thrust her out, quite apart from himself, to contemplate 
her disgraceful revolutions. 

Deeply read in the Book of Egoism that he was, he 
knew the wisdom of the sentence: An injured pride that 
strikes not out will strike home . What was he to strike 
with? Ten years younger, Lsetitia might have been the 
instrument. To think of her now was preposterous. Be¬ 
side Clara she had the hue of Winter under the springing 
bough. He tossed her away, vexed to the very soul by an 
ostentatious decay that shrank from comparison with the 
blooming creature he had to scourge in self-defence, by 
some agency or other. 

Mrs. Mountstuart was on the step of her carriage when 
the silken parasols of the young ladies were descried on a 
slope of the park, where the yellow green of May-clothed 
beeches flowed over the brown ground of last year’s leaves. 

“ Who’s the cavalier ? ” she inquired. 

A gentleman escorted them. 

“Vernon? No! he’s pegging at Crossjay,” quoth 
Willoughby. 

Vernon and Crossjay came out for the boy’s half-hour’s 
run before his dinner. Crossjay spied Miss Middleton 
and was off to meet her at a bound. Vernon followed him 
leisurely. 

“ The rogue has no cousin, has she ? ” said Mrs. Mount¬ 
stuart. 

“ It’s a family of one son or one daughter for genera¬ 
tions,” replied Willoughby. 

“And Letty Dale?” 

“Cousin!” he exclaimed, as if wealth had been im¬ 
puted to Miss Dale; adding: “No male cousin.” 

A railway-station fly drove out of the avenue on the 
circle to the hall-entrance. Flitch was driver. He had 


166 


THE EGOIST 


no right to be there, he was doing wrong, but he was doing 
it under cover of an office, to support his wife and young 
ones, and his deprecating touches of the hat spoke of these 
apologies to his former master with dog-like pathos. 

Sir Willoughby beckoned to him to approach. 

‘4So you are here,” he said. “You have luggage.” 

Flitch jumped from the box and read one of the labels 
aloud: “Lieut.-Colonel H. De Craye.” 

“ And the colonel met the ladies ? Overtook them ? ” 

Here seemed to come dismal matter for Flitch to relate. 

He began upon the abstract origin of it: he had lost his 
place in Sir Willoughby’s establishment, and was obliged 
to look about for work where it was to be got, and though 
he knew he had no right to be where he was, he hoped to 
be forgiven because of the mouths he had to feed as a 
flyman attached to the railway station, where this gentle¬ 
man, the colonel, hired him, and he believed Sir Wil¬ 
loughby would excuse him for driving a friend, which the 
colonel was, he recollected well, and the colonel recollected 
him, and he said, not noticing how he was rigged: 
“What! Flitch! back in your old place? — Am I ex¬ 
pected ?” and he told the colonel his unfortunate situation: 
“Not back, colonel; no such luck for me:” and Colonel 
I)e Craye was a very kind-hearted gentleman, as he always 
had been, and asked kindly after his family. And it 
might be that such poor work as he was doing now he 
might be deprived of, such is misfortune when it once 
harpoons a man; you may dive, and you may fly, but it 
sticks in you, once do a foolish thing. “ May I humbly 
beg of you, if you ’ll be so good, Sir Willoughby,” said 
Flitch, passing to evidence of the sad mishap. He opened 
the door of the fly, displaying fragments of broken 
porcelain. 

“But, what, what! what’s the story of this?” cried Sir 
Willoughby. 

“What is it?” said Mrs. Mountstuart, pricking up her 
ears. 

“It was a vaws,” Flitch replied in elegy. 

“A porcelain vase! ” interpreted Sir Willoughby. 

“China! ” Mrs. Mountstuart faintly shrieked. 

One of the pieces was handed to her inspection. 


THE PORCELAIN YASE 


167 


She held it close, she held it distant. She sighed horribly. 

“The man had better have hanged himself,” said she. 

Flitch bestirred his misfortune-sodden features and 
members for a continuation of the doleful narrative. 

“How did this occur?” Sir Willoughby peremptorily 
asked him. ' 

Flitch appealed to his former master for testimony that 
he was a good and a careful driver. 

Sir Willoughby thundered: “I tell you to tell me how 
this occurred.” 

“Not a drop, my lady! not since my supper last night, 
if there’s any truth in me;” Flitch implored succour of 
Mrs. Mountstuart. 

“Drive straight,” she said, and braced him. 

His narrative was then direct. 

Near Piper’s mill, where the Wicker brook crossed the 
Rebdon road, one of Hoppner’s waggons, overloaded as 
uusal, was forcing the horses uphill, when Flitch drove 
down at an easy pace, and saw himself between Hoppner’s 
cart come to a stand, and a young lady advancing: and 
just then the carter smacks his whip, the horses pull half 
mad. The young lady starts behind the cart, and up 
jumps the colonel, and to save the young lady, Flitch 
dashed ahead and did save her, he thanked heaven for it, 
and more when he came to see who the young lady was. 

“ She was alone ?” said Sir Willoughby, in tragic amaze¬ 
ment, staring at Flitch. * 

“Very well, you saved her, and you upset the fly,” 
Mrs. Mountstuart jogged him on. 

“ Bartlett, our old head-keeper, was a witness, my lady; 
I had to drive half up the bank, and it’s true — over the 
fly did go; and the vaws it shoots out against the twelfth 
milestone, just as though there was the chance for it! for 
nobody else was injured, and knocked against anything 
else, it never would have flown all to pieces, so that it 
took Bartlett and me ten minutes to collect every one, 
down to the smallest piece there was; and he said, and I 
can’t help thinking myself, there was a Providence in it, 
for we all come together so as you might say we was 
made to do as we did.” 

“ So then Horace adopted the prudent course of walking 


168 


THE EGOIST 


on with the ladies instead of trusting his limbs again to 
this capsizing fly,” Sir Willoughby said to Mrs. Mount¬ 
stuart; and she rejoined: “Lucky that no one was hurt.” 

Both of them eyed the nose of poor Flitch, and simul¬ 
taneously they delivered a verdict of “Humph.” 

Mrs. Mountstuart handed the wretch a half-crown from 
her purse. Sir Willoughby directed the footman in 
attendance to unload the fly and gather up the fragments 
of porcelain carefully, bidding Flitch be quick in his 
departing. 

“The colonePs wedding present! I shall call to¬ 
morrow,” Mrs. Mountstuart waved her adieu. 

“Come every day! — Yes, I suppose we may guess the 
destination of the vase.” He bowed her off: and she 
cried, — 

“Well, now the gift can be shared, if you ’re either of 
you for a division.” In the crash of the carriage-wheels he 
heard: “At any rate, there was a rogue in that porcelain.” 

These are the slaps we get from a heedless world. 

As for the vase, it was Horace De Craye’s loss. Wedding- 
present he would have to produce, and decidedly not in 
chips. It had the look of a costly vase, but that was no 
question for the moment: — What was meant by Clara 
being seen walking on the highroad alone ? — What snare, 
traceable ad inf eras, had ever induced Willoughby Pat- 
terne to make her the repository and fortress of his 
honourl • 


CHAPTER XVIII 

COLONEL DE CRAVE 

Clara came along chatting and laughing with Colonel 
de Craye, young Crossjay’s hand under one of her arms, 
and her parasol flashing; a dazzling offender; as if she 
wished to compel the spectator to recognize ihe dainty 
rogue in procelain; really insufferably fair: perfect in 
height and grace of movement; exquisitely-tressed; red¬ 
lipped, the colour striking out to a distance from hej 



COLONEL DE CRAYE 


169 


ivory skin: a sight to set the woodland dancing, and turn 
the heads of the town; though beautiful, a jury of art- 
critics might pronounce her not to be. Irregular features 
are condemned in beauty. Beautiful figure, they could 
say. A description of her figure and her walking would 
have won her any praises: and she wore a dress cunning 
to embrace the shape and flutter loose about it, in the 
spirit of a Summer’s day. Calypso-clad, Dr. Middleton 
would have called her. See the silver birch in a breeze: 
here it swells, there it scatters, and it is puffed to a round 
and it streams like a pennon, and now gives the glimpse 
and shine of the white stem’s line within, now hurries 
over it, denying that it was visible, with a chatter along 
the sweeping folds, while still the white peeps through. 
She had the wonderful art of dressing to suit the season 
and the sky. To-day the art was ravishingly companion¬ 
able with her sweet-lighted face: too sweet, too vividly- 
meaningful for pretty, if not of the strict severity for 
beautiful. Millinery would tell us that she wore a fichu 
of thin white muslin crossed in front on a dress of the same 
light stuff, trimmed with deep rose. She carried a grey- 
silk parasol, traced at the borders with green creepers, and 
across the arm devoted to Crossjay, a length of trailing 
ivy, and in that hand a bunch of the first long grasses. 
These hues of red rose and green and pale green, raffled 
and pouted in the billowy white of the dress ballooning and 
valleying softly, like a yacht before the sail bends low; 
biit she walked not like one blown against; resembling 
rather the day of the South-west driving the clouds, 
gallantly firm in commotion; interfusing colour and vary¬ 
ing in her features from laugh to smile and look of settled 
pleasure, like the heavens above the breeze. 

Sir Willoughby, as he frequently had occasion to protest 
to Clara, was no poet: he was a more than commonly 
candid English gentleman in his avowed dislike of the 
poet’s nonsense, verbiage, verse; not one of those latterly 
terrorized by the noise made about the fellow into silent 
contempt; a sentiment that may sleep, and has not to be 
defended. He loathed the fellow, fought the fellow. But 
he was one with the poet upon that prevailing theme of 
verse, the charms of women. He was, to his ill-luck, 


170 


THE EGOIST 


intensely susceptible, and where he led men after him to 
admire, his admiration became a fury. He could see at a 
glance that Horace De Craye admired Miss Middleton. 
Horace was a man of taste, could hardly, could not, do 
other than admire; but how curious that in the setting 
forth of Clara and Miss Dale, in his own contemplation 
and comparison of them, Sir Willoughby had given but a 
nodding approbation of his bride’s appearance! He had 
not attached weight to it recently. 

Her conduct, and foremost, if not chiefly, her having 
been discovered, positively met by his friend Horace, 
walking on the highroad without companion or attendant, 
increased a sense of pain so very unusual with him that he 
had cause to be indignant. Coming on this condition, 
his admiration of the girl who wounded him was as bitter 
a thing as a man could feel. Kesentment, fed from the 
main springs of his nature, turned it to wormwood, and 
not a whit the less was it admiration when he resolved to 
chastise her with a formal indication of his disdain. Her 
present gaiety sounded to him like laughter heard in the 
shadow of the pulpit. 

“You have escaped!” he said to her, while shaking the 
hand of his friend Horace and cordially welcoming him 
“ My dear fellow! and by the way, you had a squeak for 
it, I hear from Flitch.” 

“I, Willoughby? not a bit,” said the colonel; “we get 
into a fly to get out of it; and Flitch helped me out as well 
as in, good fellow; just dusting my coat as he did it. 
The only bit of bad management was that Miss Middleton 
had to step aside a trifle hurriedly.” 

“ You knew Miss Middleton at once ? ” 

“Flitch did me the favour to introduce me. He first 
precipitated me at Miss Middleton’s feet, and then he 
introduced me, in old oriental fashion, to my sovereign.” 

Sir Willoughby’s countenance was enough for his friend 
Horace. Quarter-wheeling to Clara, he said: “’Tis the 
place I’m to occupy for life, Miss Middleton, though one 
is not always fortunate to have a bright excuse for taking 
it at the commencement.” 

Clara said: “Happily you were not hurt, Colonel Dc 
Craye.” 


COLONEL DE CRATE 


171 


“I was in the hands of the Loves. Not the Graces; I ’m 
afraid; I’ve an image of myself. Dear, no! My dear 
Willoughby, you never made such a headlong declaration 
as that. It would have looked like a magnificent impulse, 
if the posture had only been choicer. And Miss Middleton 
did n’t laugh. At least I saw nothing but pity.” 

“You did not write,” said Willoughby. 

“ Because it was a toss-up of a run to Ireland or here, 
and I came here not to go there; and by the way, fetched 
a jug with me to offer up to the Gods of ill-luck; and they 
accepted the propitiation.” 

“ Was n’t it packed in a box ? ” 

“No, it was wrapped in paper, to show its elegant form. 
I caught sight of it in the shop yesterday and carried it 
off this morning, and presented it to Miss Middleton at 
noon, without any form at all.” 

Willoughby knew his friend Horace’s mood when the 
Irish tongue in him threatened to wag. 

“You see what may happen,” he said to Clara. 

“As far as I am in fault I regret it,” she answered. 

“Flitch says the accident occurred through his driving, 
up the bank to save you from the wheels.” 

“ Flitch may go and whisper that down the neck of his 
empty whisky flask,” said Horace De Craye. “And then 
let him cork it.” 

“The consequence is that we have a porcelain vase 
broken. You should not walk on the road alone, Clara. 
You ought to have a companion, always. It is the rule 
here.” 

“I had left Miss Dale at the cottage.” 

“You ought to have had the dogs.” 

“Would they have been any protection to the vase ?” 

Horace De Craye crowed cordially. 

“ I’m afraid not, Miss Middleton. One must go to the 
witches for protection to vases; and they ’re all in the air 
now, having their own way with us, which accounts for 
the confusion in politics and society, and the rise in the 
price of broomsticks, to prove it true, as they tell us, that 
every nook and corner wants a mighty sweeping. Miss 
Dale looks beaming,” said De Craye, wishing to divert 
Willoughby from his anger with sense as well as nonsense. 


172 THE EGOIST 

“You have not been visiting Ireland recently/’ said Sir 
Willoughby. 

“No, nor making acquaintance with an actor in an Irish 
part in a drama cast in the green island. ’T is Flitch, my 
dear Willoughby, has been and stirred the native in me, 
and we ’ll present him to you for the like good office when 
we hear after a number of years that you’ve not wrinkled 
your forehead once at your liege lady. Take the poor old 
dog back home, will you ? He’s crazed to be at the Hall. 
I say, Willoughby, it would be a good bit of work to take 
him back. Think of it; you ’ll do the popular thing, I’m 
sure. I’ve a superstition that Flitch ought to drive you 
from the church-door. If I were in luck, I ’d have him 
drive me.” 

“The man’s a drunkard, Horace.” 

“He fuddles his poor nose. ’T is merely unction to the 
exile. Sober struggles below. He drinks to rock his 
heart, because he has one. Now let me intercede for 
poor Flitch.” 

“Not a word of him. He threw up his place.” 

“ To try his fortune in the world, as the best of us do, 
though livery runs after us to tell us there’s no being an 
independent gentleman, and comes a cold day we haul on 
the metal-button coat again, with a good ha! of satisfac¬ 
tion. You ’ll do the popular thing. Miss Middleton joins 
in the pleading.” 

“No pleading!” 

“When I’ve vowed upon my eloquence, Willoughby, 
I ’d bring you to pardon the poor dog ?” 

“ Not a word of him! ” 

“Just one! ” 

Sir Willoughby battled with himself to repress a state 
of temper that put him to marked disadvantage beside his 
friend Horace in high spirits. Ordinarily he enjoyed these 
fits of Irish of him, which were Horace’s fun and play, at 
times involuntary, and then they indicated a recklessness 
that might embrace mischief. De Craye, as Willoughby 
had often reminded him, was properly Norman. The 
blood of two or three Irish mothers in his line, however, 
was enough to dance him, and if his fine profile spoke of 
the stiffer race, his eyes and the quick run of the lip in 


COLONEL DE CEAYE 173 

the cheek, and a number of his qualities, were evidence of 
the maternal legacy. 

“My word has been said about the man/’ Willoughby 
replied. 

“ But I ’ve wagered on your heart against your word, 
and can’t afford to lose ; and there ’s a double reason for 
revoking for you! ” 

“I don’t see either of them. Here are the ladies.” 

“You ’ll think of the poor beast, Willoughby.” 

“I hope for better occupation.” 

“ If he drives a wheelbarrow at the Hall he ’ll be happier 
than on board a chariot at large. He’s broken-hearted.” 

“He’s too much in the way of breakages, my dear 
Horace.” 

“Oh! the vase! the bit of porcelain!” sang De Craye. 
“Well, we ’ll talk him over by-and-by.” 

“If it pleases you; but my rules are never amended.” 

“ Inalterable, are they ? — like those of an ancient people 
who might as well have worn a jacket of lead for the com¬ 
fort they had of their boast. The beauty of laws for 
human creatures is their adaptability to new stitchings.” 

Colonel De Craye walked at the heels of his leader to 
make his bow to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. 

Sir Willoughby had guessed the person who inspired his 
friend Horace to plead so pertinaciously and inopportunely 
for the man Flitch; and it had not improved his temper 
or the pose of his rejoinders; he had winced under the 
contrast of his friend Horace’s easy, laughing, sparkling, 
musical air and manner with his own stiffness; and he 
had seen Clara’s face, too, scanning the contrast — he was 
fatally driven to exaggerate his discontentment, which did 
not restore him to serenity. He would have learnt more 
from what his abrupt swing round of the shoulder pre¬ 
cluded his beholding. There was an interchange between 
Colonel De Craye and Miss Middleton; spontaneous on 
both sides. His was a look that said: “You were right;” 
hers: “I knew it.” Her look was calmer, and after the 
first instant clouded as by wearifulness of sameness; his 
was brilliant, astonished, speculative, and admiring, piti¬ 
ful: a look that poised over a revelation, called up the 
hosts of wonder to question strange fact. 


174 


THE EGOIST 


It had passed unseen by Sir Willoughby. The observer 
was the one who could also supply the key of the secret. 
Miss Dale had found Colonel De Craye in company with 
Miss Middleton at her gateway. They were laughing and 
talking together like friends of old standing, De Craye 
as Irish as he could be: and the Irish tongue and gentle* 
manly manner are an irresistible challenge to the open¬ 
ing steps of familiarity when accident has broken the 
ice. Flitch was their theme; and: “Oh! but if we go 
up to Willoughby hand in hand, and bob a curtsey to 
’m and beg his pardon for Mister Flitch, won’t he melt 
to such a pair of suppliants ? of course he will! ” Miss 
Middleton said he would not. Colonel De Craye wagered 
he would; he knew Willoughby best. Miss Middleton 
looked simply grave; a way of asserting the contrary opin¬ 
ion that ttflls of rueful experience. “We’ll see,” said 
the colonel. They chatted like a couple unexpectedly 
discovering in one another a common dialect among 
strangers. Can there be an end to it when those two 
meet? They prattle, they fill the minutes, as though 
they were violently to be torn asunder at a coming signal, 
and must have it out while they can; it is a meeting of 
mountain brooks; not a colloquy but a chasing, impossible 
to say which flies, which follows, or what the topic, so 
interlinguistic are they and rapidly counterchanging. 
After their conversation of an hour before, Laetitia watched 
Miss Middleton in surprise at her lightness of mind. 
Clara bathed in mirth. A boy in a Summer stream shows 
not heartier refreshment of his whole being. Laetitia 
could now understand Vernon’s idea of her wit. And it 
seemed that she also had Irish blood. Speaking of Ireland, 
Miss Middleton said she had cousins there, her only 
relatives. 

“ The laugh told me that, ” said Colonel De Craye. 

Laetitia and Vernon paced up and down the lawn. 
Colonel De Craye was talking with English sedateness to 
the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. Clara and young Crossiay 
strayed. 

“If I might advise, I would say, do not leave the Hall 
immediately, not yet,” Laetitia said to Vernon. 

“ You know, then ? ” 


COLONEL DE CRAYE 175 

“ I cannot understand why it was that I was taken into 
her confidence.” 

“I counselled it.” 

“But it was done without an object that I can see.” 

“The speaking did her good.” 

“ But how capricious! how changeful! ” 

“Better now than later.” 

“ Surely she has only to ask to be released ? — to aBk 
earnestly: if it is her wish.” 

“You are mistaken.” 

“ Why does she not make a confidant of her father ? ” 

“That she will have to do. She wished to spare him.” 

“ He cannot be spared if she is to break the engagement.” 

“She thought of sparing him the annoyance. Now 
there’s to be a tussle he must share in it.” 

“Or she thought he might not side with her ?” 

“She has not a single instinct of cunning. You judge 
her harshly.” 

“ She moved me on the walk out. Coming home I felt 
differently. ” 

Vernon glanced at Colonel De Craye. 

“She wants good guidance,” continued Laetitia. 

“She has not an idea of treachery.” 

“You think so? It may be true. But she seems one 
born devoid of patience, easily made reckless. There is 
a wildness ... I judge by her way of speaking; that at 
least appeared sincere. She does not practise concealment. 
He will naturally find it almost incredible. The change 
in her, so sudden, so wayward, is unintelligible to me. 
To me it is the conduct of a creature untamed. He may 
hold her to her word and be justified.” 

“Let him look out if he does! ” 

“Is not that harsher than anything I have said of her ?” 

“I ’m not appointed to praise her. I fancy I read the 
case; and it’s a case of opposition of temperaments. We 
never oan tell the person quite suited to us; it strikes us 
in a flash.” 

“ That they are not suited to us ? Oh, no; that comes 
by degrees.” 

“Yes, but the accumulation of evidence, or sentience, 
if you like, is combustible; we don’t command the spark: 


176 


THE EGOIST 


it may be late in falling. And you argue in her favour. 
Consider her as a generous and impulsive girl, outwearied 
at last.” 

“ By what ? ” 

“By anything; by his loftiness, if you like. He flies 
too high for her, we will say.” 

“ Sir Willoughby an eagle ? ” 

“She may be tired of his eyrie.” 

The sound of the word in Vernon’s mouth smote on a 
consciousness she had of his full grasp of Sir Willoughby, 
and her own timid knowledge, though he was not a man 
who played on words. 

If he had eased his heart in stressing the first syllable, 
it was only temporary relief. He was heavy-browed 
enough. 

“ But I cannot conceive what she expects me to do by 
confiding her sense of her position to me,” said Lsetitia. 

“We none of us know what will be done. We hang on 
Willoughby, who hangs on whatever it is that supports 
him: and there we are in a swarm.” 

“You see the wisdom of staying, Mr. Whitford.” 

“It must be over in a day or two. Yes, I stay.” 

“She inclines to obey you.” 

“I should be sorry to stake my authority on her obedi¬ 
ence. We must decide something about Crossjay, and 
get the money for his crammer, if it is to be got. If not, 
I may get a man to trust me. I mean to drag the boy 
away. Willoughby has been at him with the tune of 
gentleman, and has laid hold of him by one ear. W T hen 
I say ‘ her obedience,’ she is not in a situation, nor in a 
condition, to be led blindly by anybody. She must rely 
on herself, do everything herself. It’s a knot that won’t 
bear touching by any hand save hers.” 

“ I fear ...” said Lsetitia. 

“Have no such fear.” 

“If it should come to his positively refusing.” 

“He faces the consequences.” 

“You do not think of her.” 

Vernon looked at his companion. 


COLONEL DE CRAVE AND CLARA MIDDLETON 177 


CHAPTER XIX 

COLONEL DE CRAYE AND CLARA MIDDLETON 

Miss Middleton finished her stroll with Crossjay by 
winding her trailer of ivy in a wreath round his hat and 
sticking her bunch of grasses in the wreath. She then 
commanded him to sit on the ground beside a big rhodo¬ 
dendron, there to await her return. Crossjay had informed 
her of a design he entertained to be off with a horde of 
boys nesting in high trees, and marking spots where wasps 
and hornets were to be attacked in Autumn: she thought 
it a dangerous business, and as the boy’s dinner-bell had 
very little restraint over him when he was in the flush of 
a scheme of this description, she wished to make tolerably 
sure of him through the charm she not unreadily believed 
she could fling on lads of his age. “Promise me you will 
not move from here until I come back, and when I come I 
will give you a kiss.” Crossjay promised. She left him 
and forgot him. 

Seeing by her watch fifteen minutes to the ringing of 
the bell, a sudden resolve that she would speak to her 
father without another minute’s delay, had prompted her 
like a superstitious impulse to abandon her aimless course 
and be direct. She knew what was good for her; she 
knew it now more clearly than in the morning. To be 
taken away instantly! was her cry. There could be no 
further doubt. Had there been any before ? But she 
would not in the morning have suspected herself of a 
capacity for evil, and of a pressing need to be saved from 
herself. She was not pure of nature: it may be that we 
breed saintly souls which are: she was pure of will: fire 
rather than ice. And in beginning to see the elements 
she was made of, she did not shuffle them to a heap with 
her sweet looks to front her. She put to her account 
some strength, much weakness; she almost dared to gaze 
unblinking at a perilous evil tendency. The glimpse of 
it drove her to her father. 

“He must take me away at once; to-morrow ! ” 


178 


THE EGOIST 


She wished to spare her father. So unsparing of her¬ 
self was she, that in her hesitation to speak to him of her 
change of feeling for Sir Willoughby, she would not 
suffer it to be attributed in her own mind to a daughter’s 
anxious consideration about her father’s loneliness; an 
idea she had indulged formerly. Acknowledging that it 
was imperative she should speak, she understood that she 
had refrained, even to the inflicting upon herself of such 
humiliation as to run dilating on her woes to others, be¬ 
cause of the silliest of human desires to preserve her rep¬ 
utation for consistency. She had heard women abused 
for shallowness and flightiness: she had heard her father 
denounce them as veering weather-vanes, and his oft- 
repeated quid femina possit: for her sex’s sake, and also 
to appear an exception to her sex, this reasoning creature 
desired to be thought consistent. 

Just on the instant of her addressing him, saying, 
“ Father: ” a note of seriousness in his ear: it struck her 
that the occasion for saying all had not yet arrived, and 
she quickly interposed, “Papa; ” and helped him to look 
lighter. The petition to be taken away was uttered. 

“ To London ? ” said Dr. Middleton. “ I don’t know 
who ’ll take us in.” 

“To France, papa?” 

“That means hotel-life.” 

“Only for two or three weeks.” 

“Weeks! I am under an engagement to dine with Mrs. 
Mountstuart Jenkinson five days hence: that is, on 
Thursday.” 

“ Could we not find an excuse ? ” 

“Break an engagement? No, my dear, not even to 
escape drinking a widow’s wine.” 

“ Does a word bind us ? ” 

“ Why, what else should ? ” 

“I think I am not very well.” 

“We ’ll call in that man we met at dinner here: Cor* 
ney: a capital doctor; an old-fashioned anecdotal doctor. 
How is it you are not well, my love ? You look well. I 
cannot conceive your not being well.” 

“It is only that I want a change of air, papa.” 

“ There we are — a change! semper eadem! Women 


COLONEL DE CRAYE AND CLARA MIDDLETON 179 

will be wanting a change of air in Paradise; a change of 
angels too, I might surmise. A change from quarters 
like these to a French hotel, would be a descent! — ‘ this 
^he seat, this mournful gloom for that celestial light.’ I 
am perfectly at home in the library here. That excellent 
fellow Whitford and I have real days: and I like him for 
showing fight to his elder and better.” 

“He is going to leave.” 

“I know nothing of it, and I shall append no credit 
to the tale until I do know. He is headstrong, but he 
answers to a rap.” 

Clara’s bosom heaved. The speechless insurrection 
threatened her eyes. 

A South-west shower lashed the window-panes and sug¬ 
gested to Dr. Middleton shuddering visions of the channel- 
passage on board a steamer. 

“Corney shall see you: he is a sparkling draught in 
person; probably illiterate, if I may judge from one in¬ 
terruption of my discourse when he sat opposite me, but 
lettered enough to respect Learning and write out his 
prescription: I do not ask more of men or of physicians.” 
Dr. Middleton said this rising, glancing at the clock and 
at the back of his hands. “ ‘ Quod autem secundum litteras 
difiicillimum esse artificium ? 9 But what after letters is 
the more difficult practice? ‘Ego puto medicum.’ The 
medicus next to the scholar: though I have not to my 
recollection required him next me, nor ever expected 
child of mine to be crying for that milk. Daughter she is 
— of the unexplained sex: we will send a messenger for 
Corney. Change, my dear, you will speedily have, to 
satisfy the most craving of women, if Willoughby, as I 
suppose, is in the neoteric fashion of spending a honey¬ 
moon on a railway: apt image, exposition and perpetuation 
of the state of mania conducting to the institution! In 
my time we lay by to brood on happiness; we had no 
thought of chasing it over a Continent, mistaking hurly- 
burly clothed in dust for the divinity we sought. A 
smaller generation sacrifices to excitement. Dust and 
hurly-burly must perforce be the issue. And that is your 
modern world. Now, my dear, let us go and wash our 
hands. Midday-bells expect immediate attention. They 
know of no ante-room of assembly.” 


180 


THE EGOIST 


Clara stood gathered up, despairing at opportunity lost. 
He had noticed her contracted shape and her eyes, and 
had talked magisterially to smother and overbear the 
something disagreeable prefigured in her appearance. 

“You do not despise your girl, father ?” 

“I do not; I could not; I love her; I love my girl. But 
you need not sing to me like a gnat to propound that 
question, my dear.” 

“Then, father, tell Sir Willoughby to-day we have to 
leave to-morrow. You shall return in time for Mrs. 
Mountstuart’s dinner. Friends will take us in, the Darle- 
tons, the Erpinghams. We can go to Oxford, where you 
are sure of welcome. A little will recover me. Do not 
mention doctors. But you see I am nervous. I am quite 
ashamed of it; I am well enough to laugh at it, only I 
cannot overcome it; and I feel that a day or two will 
restore me. Say you will. Say it in First-Lesson-Book 
language; anything above a primer splits my foolish head 
to-day.” 

Dr. Middleton shrugged, spreading out his arms. 

“The office of ambassador from you to Willoughby, 
Clara ? You decree me to the part of ball between two 
bats. The Play being assured, the prologue is a bladder 
of wind. I seem to be instructed in one of the mysteries 
of erotic esotery, yet on my word I am no wiser. If Wil¬ 
loughby is to hear anything from you, he will hear it from 
your lips.” 

“Yes, father, yes. We have differences. I am not fit 
for contests at present; my head is giddy. I wish to 
avoid an illness. He and I ... I accuse myself.” 

“ There is the bell! ” ejaculated Dr. Middleton. “ I ’ll 
debate on it with Willoughby.” 

“ This afternoon ? ” 

“Somewhen, before the dinner-bell. I cannot tie my¬ 
self to the minute-hand of the clock, my dear child. And 
let me direct you, for the next occasion when you shall 
bring the vowels I and A, in verbally detached letters, 
into collision, that you do not fill the hiatus with so pro¬ 
nounced a Y. It is the vulgarization of our tongue of 
which I y-accuse you. I do not like my girl to be guilty 
of it.” 


COLONEL DE CRAYE AND CLARA MIDDLETON 181 


He smiled to moderate the severity of the correction, 
and kissed her forehead. 

She declared her inability to sit and eat; she went to her 
room, after begging him very earnestly to send her the 
assurance that he had spoken. She had not shed a tear, 
and she rejoiced in her self-control; it whispered to her 
of true courage when she had given herself such evidence 
of the reverse. 

Shower and sunshine alternated through the half-hours 
of the afternoon, like a procession of dark and fair holding 
hands and passing. The shadow came, and she was chill; 
the light yellow in moisture, and she buried her face not 
to be caught up by cheerfulness. Believing that her head 
ached, she afflicted herself with all the heavy symptoms 
and oppressed her mind so thoroughly that its occupation 
was to speculate on Laetitia Dale’s modest enthusiasm for 
rural pleasures, for this place especially, with its rich 
foliage and peeps of scenic peace. The prospect of an 
escape from it inspired thoughts of a loveable round of life 
where the sun was not a naked ball of fire but a friend 
clothed in woodland; where park and meadow swept to 
well-known features East and West; and distantly circling 
hills, and the hearts of poor cottagers too — sympathy with 
whom assured her of goodness — were familiar, homely to 
the dweller in the place, morning and night. And she 
had the love of wild flowers, the watchful happiness in 
the seasons; poets thrilled her, books absorbed. She 
dwelt strongly on that sincerity of feeling; it gave root in 
our earth; she needed it as she pressed a hand on her 
eyeballs, conscious of acting the invalid, though the rea¬ 
sons she had for languishing under headache were so 
convincing that her brain refused to disbelieve in it and 
went some way to produce positive throbs. Otherwise she 
had no excuse for shutting herself in her room. Vernon 
Whitford would be sceptical. Headache or none, Colonel 
De Craye must be thinking strangely of her; she had not 
shown him any sign of illness. His laughter and his talk 
sang about her and dispersed the fiction; he was the very 
sea-wind for bracing unstrung nerves. Her ideas reverted 
to Sir Willoughby, and at once they had no more cohesion 
than the foam on a torrent-water. 


182 


THE EGOIST 


But soon she was undergoing a variation ot sentiment. 
Her maid Barclay brought her this pencilled line from her 
father, — 

“Factum est; laetus est; amantium irae, &c.” 

That it was done, that Willoughby had put on an air of 
glad acquiescence, and that her father assumed the exist¬ 
ence of a lover’s quarrel, was wonderful to her at first 
sight, simple the succeeding minute. Willoughby indeed 
must be tired of her, glad of her going. He would know 
that it was not to return. She was grateful to him for 
perhaps hinting at the amantium irae, though she rejected 
the folly of the verse. And she gazed over dear homely 
country through her windows now. Happy the lady of 
the place, if happy she can be in her choice! Clara Mid¬ 
dleton envied her the double-blossom wild cherry-tree, 
nothing else. One sprig of it, if it had not faded and 
gone to dust-colour like crusty Alpine snow in the lower 
hollows, and then she could depart, bearing away a mem¬ 
ory of the best here! Her fiction of the headache pained 
her no longer. She changed her muslin dress for silk; 
she was contented with the first bonnet Barclay presented. 
Amicable toward every one in the house, Willoughby 
included, she threw up her window, breathed, blessed 
mankind: and she thought: “If Willoughby would open 
his heart to nature, he would be relieved of his wretched 
opinion of the world.” Nature was then sparkling re¬ 
freshed in the last drops of a sweeping rain-curtain, favour¬ 
ably disposed for a background to her joyful optimism. A 
little nibble of hunger within, real hunger, unknown to 
her of late, added to this healthy view, without precipi¬ 
tating her to appease it; she was more inclined to foster 
it, for the sake of the sinewy activity of limb it gave her; 
and in the style of young ladies very light of heart, she 
went downstairs like a cascade; and like the meteor ob¬ 
served in its vanishing trace she alighted close to Colonel 
Be Craye and entered one of the rooms off the hall. 

He cocked an eye at the half-shut door. 

Now, you have only to be reminded that it is the habit 
of the sportive gentleman of easy life, bewildered as he 
would otherwise be by the tricks, twists, and windings of 
the hunted sex, to parcel out fair women into classes ; and 


COLONEL DE CRAYE AND CLARA MIDDLETON 188 

some are flyers and some are runners; these birds are wild 
on the wing, those expose their bosoms to the shot. For 
him there is no individual woman. He grants her a char¬ 
acteristic only to enroll her in a class. He is our immortal 
dunce at learning to distinguish her as a personal variety, 
of a separate growth. 

Colonel De Craye’s cock of the eye at the door said that 
he had seen a rageing coquette go behind it. He had his 
excuse for forming the judgement. She had spoken strangely 
of the fall of his wedding present, strangely of Willoughby; 
or there was a sound of strangeness in an allusion to 
her appointed husband; and she had treated Willoughby 
strangely when they met. Above all, her word about Flitch 
was curious. And then that look of hers ! And subse¬ 
quently she transferred her polite attentions to Willough¬ 
by’s friend. After a charming colloquy, the sweetest 
give and take rattle he had ever enjoyed with a girl, she 
developed headache to avoid him ; and next she developed 
blindness, for the same purpose. 

He was feeling hurt, but considered it preferable to feel 
challenged. 

Miss Middleton came out of another door. She had seen 
him when she had passed him and when it was too late to 
convey her recognition; and now she addressed him with 
an air of having bowed as she went by. 

“ No one ? ” she said. “ Am I alone in the house ? ” 

“ There is a figure naught,” said he, “ but it’s as good as 
annihilated, and no figure at all, if you put yourself on the 
wrong side of it, and wish to be alone in the house.” 

“ Where is Willoughby ? ” 

“Away on business.” 

“ Riding ? ” 

“Achmet is the horse, and pray don’t let him be sold, 
Miss Middleton. I am deputed to attend on you.” 

“ I should like a stroll.” 

“ Are you perfectly restored ? ” 

11 Perfectly.” 

“ Strong ? ” 

“ I was never better.” 

“It was the answer of the ghost of the wicked old man’s 
wife when she came to persuade him he had one chance 


184 


THE EGOIST 


remaining. Then, says he, I ’ll believe in heaven if ye 'll 
Btop that bottle, and hurls it; and the bottle broke and he 
committed suicide, not without suspicion of her laying a 
trap for him. These showers curling away and leaving 
sweet scents are divine, Miss Middleton. I have the privL 
lege of the Christian name on the nuptial-day. This park 
of Willoughby's is one of the best things in England. 
There's a glimpse over the lake that smokes of a corner of 
Killarney; tempts the eye to dream, I mean." De Craye 
wound his finger spirally upward like a smoke-wreath. 
“ Are you for Irish scenery ? " 

“ Irish, English, Scottish." 

“ All's one so long as it's beautiful: yes, you speak for 
me. Cosmopolitanism of races is a different affair. I beg 
leave to doubt the true union of some; Irish and Saxon, 
for example, let Cupid be master of the ceremonies and 
the dwelling-place of the happy couple at the mouth of 
a Cornucopia. Yet I have seen a flower of Erin worn 
by a Saxon gentleman proudly; and the Hibernian court¬ 
ing a Rowena! So we 'll undo what I said, and consider 
it cancelled." 

“ Are you of the rebel party, Colonel De Craye ? " 

“I am Protestant and Conservative, Miss Middleton." 

“I have not a head for politics." 

“ The political heads I have seen would tempt me to that 
opinion." 

“Did Willoughby say when he would be back ? " 

“ He named no particular time. Dr. Middleton and Mr. 
Whitford are in the library upon a battle of the books." 

“ Happy battle ! " 

“ You are accustomed to scholars. They are rather 
intolerant of us poor fellows." 

“Of ignorance, perhaps; not of persons." 

“Your father educated you himself, I presume." 

“ He gave me as much Latin as I could take. The fault 
is mine that it is little." 

“Greek?" 

“ A little Greek." 

“ Ah ! And you carry it like a feather.” 

“ Because it is so light." 

“ Miss Middleton, I could sit down to be instructed, old 


COLONEL DE CRAYE AND CLARA MIDDLETON 185 


as I am. When women beat us, I verily believe we are the 
most beaten dogs in existence. You like the theatre ? ” 

“ Ours ? ” 

“ Acting, then.” 

“Good acting, of course.” 

“ May I venture to say you would act admirably ? ” 

“ The venture is bold, for I have never tried.” 

“ Let me see; there is Miss Dale and Mr. Whitford : you 
and I; sufficient for a two-act piece. The Irishman in 
Spain would do.” He bent to touch the grass as she stepped 
on it. “ The lawn is wet.” 

She signified that she had no dread of wet, and said: 
“English women afraid of the weather might as well be 
shut up.” 

De Craye proceeded: “ Patrick O’Neill passes over from 
Hibernia to Iberia, a disinherited son of a father in the 
claws of the lawyers, with a letter of introduction to Don 
Beltran d’Arragon, a Grandee of the First Class, who has 
a daughter Dona Serafina (Miss Middleton), the proudest 
beauty of her day, in the custody of a duena (Miss Dale), 
and plighted to Don Fernan, of the Guzman family (Mr. 
Whitford). There you have our dramatis personae.” 

“ You are Patrick ? ” 

“ Patrick himself. And I lose my letter, and I stand on 
the Prado of Madrid with the last portrait of Britannia in 
the palm of my hand, and crying in the purest brogue of my 
native land: 4 It’s all through dropping a letter I ’m here in 
Iberia instead of Hibernia, worse luck to the spelling! 5 ” 

“ But Patrick will be sure to aspirate the initial letter of 
Hibernia.” 

“ That is clever criticism, upon my word, Miss Middleton ! 
So he would. And there we have two letters dropped. But 
he ’d do it in a groan, so that it would n’t count for more than 
a ghost of one; and everything goes on the stage, since it’s 
only the laugh we want on the brink of the action. Besides 
you are to suppose the performance before a London au¬ 
dience, who have a native opposition to the aspirate and 
wouldn’t bear to hear him spoil a joke, as if he were a lord 
or a constable. It’s an instinct of the English democracy. 
So with my bit of coin turning over and over in an unde¬ 
cided way, whether it shall commit suicide to supply me a 


186 


the egoist 


supper, I behold a pair of Spanish eyes like violet lightnings 
in the black heavens of that favoured clime. Won’t you 
have violet ? ” 

44 Violet forbids my impersonation.” 

“But the lustre on black is dark violet blue.” 

“ You remind me that I have no pretention to black.” 

Colonel de Craye permitted himself to take a flitting gaze 
at Miss Middleton’s eyes. “ Chestnut,” he said. “ Well, 
and Spain is the land of chestnuts.” 

“ Then it follows that I am a daughter of Spain.” 

“ Clearly.” 

“ Logically! ” 

44 By positive deduction.” 

“ And how do I behold Patrick ? ” 

44 As one looks upon a beast of burden.” 

“Oh I” 

Miss Middleton’s exclamation was louder than the matter 
of the dialogue seemed to require. She caught her hands up. 

In the line of the outer extremity of the rhododendron, 
screened from the house windows, young Crossjay lay at his 
length, with his head resting on a doubled arm, and his ivy- 
wreathed hat on his cheek, just where she had left him, 
commanding him to stay. Half-way toward him up the 
lawn, she saw the poor boy, and the spur of that pitiful 
sight set her gliding swiftly. Colonel De Craye followed, 
pulling an end of his moustache. 

Cross jay jumped to his feet. 

“ My dear, dear Crossjay! ” she addressed him and re¬ 
proached him. “ And how hungry you must be ! And you 
must be drenched! This is really too bad.” 

“ You told me to wait here,” said Crossjay, in shy self- 
defence. 

“ I did, and you should not have done it, foolish boy ! I 
told him to wait for me here before luncheon, Colonel De 
Craye, and the foolish foolish boy! — he has had nothing to 
eat and he must have been wet through two or three times . 
— because I did not come to him I ” 

“Quite right. And the lava might overflow him and take 
the mould of him, like the sentinel at Pompeii, if he’s of 
the true stuff.” 

“ He may have caught cold, he may have a fever.” 


COLONEL DE CRAYE AND CLARA MIDDLETON 187 

“He was under your orders to stay.” 

“ I know, and I cannot forgive myself. Run In, Crossjay, 
and change your clothes. Oh! run, run to Mrs. Montague, 
and get her to give you a warm bath, and tell her from me 
to prepare some dinner for you. And change every gar¬ 
ment you have. This is unpardonable of me. I said — 
* not for politics 9 ! — I begin to think I have not a head for 
anything. But could it be imagined that Crossjay would 
not move for the dinner-bell! through all that rain ! I for¬ 
got you, Crossjay. I am so sorry; so sorry ! You shall 
make me pay any forfeit you like. Remember I am deep 
deep in your debt. And now let me see you run fast. You 
shall come in to dessert this evening.” 

Crossjay did not run. He touched her hand. 

“ You said something ? 99 

“ What did I say, Crossjay ? 99 

“You promised.” 

" What did I promise ? 99 

“ Something.” 

“Name it, dear boy.” 

He mumbled “ . . . kiss me.” 

Clara plumped down on him, enveloped him and kissed 
him. 

The affectionately remorseful impulse was too quick for a 
conventional note of admonition to arrest her from paying 
that portion of her debt. When she had sped him off to 
Mrs. Montague, she was in a blush. 

“ Dear, dear Cross jay ! ” she said sighing. 

“Yes, he’s a good lad,” remarked the colonel. “The 
fellow may well be a faithful soldier and stick to his post, 
if he receives promise of such a solde. He is a great 
favourite with you.” 

“ He is. You will do him a service by persuading Wil¬ 
loughby to send him to one of those men who get boys 
through their naval examination. And, Colonel de Craye, 
will you be kind enough to ask at the dinner-table that 
Cross jay may come in to dessert?” 

“ Certainly,” said he, wondering. 

“ And will you look after him while you are here ? 
See that no one spoils him. If you could get him away 
before you leave, it would be much to his advantage. He 


188 


THE EGOIST 


is born for the navy and should be preparing to enter it 
now.” 

“Certainly, certainly,” said De Craye, wondering more. 

“ I thank you in advance.” 

“ Shall I not be usurping ? . .” 

“No, we leave to-morrow.” 

“ For a day ? ” 

“ For longer.” 

“Two ?” 

“ It will be longer.” 

“ A week ? I shall not see you again ? ” 

“ I fear, not.” 

Colonel De Craye controlled his astonishment; he 
smothered a sensation of veritable pain, and amiably said : 
“I feel a blow, but I am sure you would not willingly 
strike. We are all involved in the regrets.” 

Miss Middleton spoke of having to see Mrs. Montague, 
the housekeeper, with reference to the bath for Crossjay, 
and stepped off the grass. He bowed, watched her a 
moment, and for parallel reasons, running close enough to 
hit one mark, he commiserated his friend Willoughby. 
The winning or the losing of that young lady struck him as 
equally lamentable for Willoughby. 


CHAPTER XX 

AN AGED AND A GREAT WINE 

The leisurely promenade up and down the lawn with 
ladies and deferential gentlemen, in anticipation of the 
dinner-bell, was Dr. Middleton’s evening pleasure. He 
walked as one who had formerly danced (in Apollo’s time 
and the young God Cupid’s), elastic on the muscles of the 
calf and foot, bearing his broad iron-grey head in grand 
elevation. The hard labour of the day approved the cool¬ 
ing exercise and the crowning refreshments of French 
cookery and wines of known vintages. He was happy at 
that hour in dispensing wisdom or nugae to his hearers, like 



AN AGED AND A GREAT WINE 


189 


fche Western sun, whose habit it is, when he is fairly treated, 
to break out in quiet splendours, which by no means exhaust 
his treasury. Blest indeed above his fellows, by the height 
of the bow-winged bird in a fair weather sunset sky above 
the pecking sparrow, is he that ever in the recurrent even¬ 
ing of his day sees the best of it ahead and soon to come. 
He has the rich reward of a youth and manhood of virtuous 
living. Dr. Middleton misdoubted the future as well as 
the past of the man who did not, in becoming gravity, exult 
to dine. That man he deemed unfit for this world and the 
next. 

An example of the good fruit of temperance, he had a 
comfortable pride in his digestion, and his political senti¬ 
ments were attuned by his veneration of the Powers reward¬ 
ing virtue. We must have a stable world where this is to 
be done. 

The Rev. Doctor was a fine old picture; a specimen of 
art peculiarly English; combining in himself piety and epi¬ 
curism, learning and gentlemanliness, with good room for 
each and a seat at one another’s table : for the rest, a strong 
man, an athlete in his youth, a keen reader of facts and no 
reader of persons, genial, agiant at a task, a steady worker 
besides, but easily discomposed. He loved his daughter and 
he feared her. However much he liked her character, the 
dread of her sex and age was constantly present to warn 
him that he was not tied to perfect sanity while the damsel 
Clara remained unmarried. Her mother had been an ami¬ 
able woman, of the poetical temperament nevertheless, too 
enthusiastic, imaginative, impulsive, for the repose of a 
sober scholar; an admirable woman, still, as you see, a 
woman, a firework. The girl resembled her. Why should 
she wish to run away from Patterne Hall for a single hour ? 
Simply because she was of the sex born mutable and ex¬ 
plosive. A husband was her proper custodian, justly reliev¬ 
ing a father. With demagogues abroad and daughters at 
home, philosophy is needed for us to keep erect. Let the 
girl be Cicero’s Tullia: well, she dies! The choicest of 
them will furnish us examples of a strange perversity. 

Miss Dale was beside Dr. Middleton. Clara came to 
them and took the other side. 

“ I was telling Miss Dale that the signal for your subjec- 


190 


THE EGOIST 


tion is my enfranchisement,” he said to her, sighing and 
smiling. “ We know the date. The date of an event to 
come certifies to it as a fact to be counted on.” 

“ Are you anxious to lose me ? ” Clara faltered. 

“ My dear, you have planted me on a field where I am to 
expect the trumpet, and when it blows I shall be quit of 
my nerves, no more.” 

Clara found nothing to seize on for a reply in these words. 
She thought upon the silence of Laetitia. 

Sir Willoughby advanced, appearing in a cordial mood. 

“ I need not ask you whether you are better,” he said to 
Clara, sparkled to Laetitia, and raised a key to the level of 
Dr. Middleton’s breast, remarking, “ I am going down to 
my inner cellar.” 

“ An inner cellar! ” exclaimed the doctor. 

** Sacred from the butler. It is interdicted to Stoneman. 
Shall I offer myself as guide to you ? My cellars are worth 
a visit.” 

“ Cellars are not catacombs. They are, if rightly con¬ 
structed, rightly considered, cloisters, where the bottle 
meditates on joys to bestow, not on dust misused I Have 
you anything great ? ” 

“ A wine aged ninety.” 

“ Is it associated with your pedigree, that you pronounce 
the age with such assurance ? ” 

“ My grandfather inherited it.” 

“ Your grandfather, Sir Willoughby, had meritorious off 
spring, not to speak of generous progenitors. What would 
have happened had it fallen into the female line I I shall 
be glad to accompany you. Port ? Hermitage ? ” 

“ Port.” 

" Ah 1 We are in England ! ” 

“ There will just be time,” said Sir Willoughby, inducing 
Dr. Middleton to step out. 

A chirrup was in the Lev. Doctor’s tone : “ Hocks, too, 
have compassed age. I have tasted senior Hocks. Their 
flavours are as a brook of many voices; they have depth 
also. Senatorial Port! we say. We cannot say that 
of any other wine.” Port is deep-sea deep. It is in its 
flavour deep; mark the difference. It is like a classic 
tragedy, organic in conception. An ancient Hermitage has 


AN AGED AND A GREAT WINE 


191 


the light of the antique; the merit that it can grow to an 
extreme old age; a merit. Neither of Hermitage nor of 
Hock can you say that it is the blood of those long years, 
retaining the strength of youth with the wisdom of age. To 
Port for that! Port is our noblest legacy ! Observe, I do 
not compare the wines; I distinguish the qualities. Let 
them live together for our enrichment; they are not rivals 
like the Idaean Three. Were they rivals, a fourth would 
challenge them. Burgundy has great genius. It does 
wonders within its period; it does all except to keep up in 
the race; it is short-lived. An aged Burgundy runs with 
a beardless Port. I cherish the fancy that Port speaks the 
sentences of wisdom, Burgundy sings the inspired Ode. 
Or put it, that Port is the Homeric hexameter, Burgundy 
the Pindaric dithyramb. What do you say ? 

“The comparison is excellent, sir.” 

“ The distinction, you would remark. Pindar astounds. 
But his elder brings us the more sustaining cup. One is a 
fountain of prodigious ascent. One is the unsounded purple 
sea of marching billows.” 

“ A very fine distinction.” 

“ I conceive you to be now commending the similes. They 
pertain to the time of the first critics of those poets. 
Touch the Greeks, and you can nothing new: all has been 
said : i Graiis, . . . praeter laudem, nullius avaris.’ Genius 
dedicated to Fame is immortal. We, sir, dedicate genius 
to the cloacaline floods. We do not address the unforget¬ 
ting Gods, but the popular stomach.” 

Sir Willoughby was patient. He was about as accord¬ 
antly coupled with Dr. Middleton in discourse as a drum 
duetting with a bass-viol; and when he struck in he 
received correction from the paedagogue-instrument. If he 
thumped affirmative or negative, he was wrong. However, 
he knew scholars to be an unmannered species; and the 
Doctor’s learnedness would be a subject to dilate on. 

In the cellar, it was the turn for the drum. Dr. Mid¬ 
dleton was tongue-tied there. Sir Willoughby gave the 
history of his wine in heads of chapters; whence it came to 
the family originally, and how it had come down to him in 
the quantity to be seen. “ Curiously, my grandfather, who 
inherited it, was a water-drinker. My father died early.” 


192 


THE EGOIST 


“Indeed! Dear me!” the Doctor ejaculated in astonish, 
ment and condolence. The former glanced at the contra¬ 
riety of man, the latter embraced his melancholy destiny. 

He was impressed with respect for the family. This 
cool vaulted cellar, and the central square block, or enceinte, 
where the thick darkness was not penetrated by the intrud¬ 
ing lamp, but rather took it as an eye, bore witness to fore¬ 
thoughtful practical solidity in the man who had built the 
house on such foundations. A house having a great wine 
stored below, lives in our imaginations as a joyful house 
fast and splendidly rooted in the soil. And imagination 
has a place for the heir of the house. His grandfather a 
water-drinker, his father dying early, present circumstances 
to us arguing predestination to an illustrious heirship and 
career. Dr. Middleton’s musings were coloured by the 
friendly vision of glasses of the great wine; his mind was 
festive; it pleased him, and he chose to indulge in his 
whimsical-robustious, grandiose-airy style of thinking: from 
which the festive mind will sometimes take a certain print 
that we cannot obliterate immediately. Expectation is 
grateful, you know; in the mood of gratitude we are waxen. 
And he was a self-humouring gentleman. 

He liked Sir Willoughby’s tone in ordering the servant at 
his heels to take up “ those two bottles : ” it prescribed, with¬ 
out overdoing it, a proper amount of caution, and it named 
an agreeable number. 

Watching the man’s hand keenly, he said, — 

“ But here is the misfortune of a thing super-excellent: — 
not more than one in twenty will do it justice.” 

Sir Willoughby replied : “ Very true, sir, and I think we 
may pass over the nineteen.” 

“Women, for example: and most men.” 

“ This wine would be a sealed book to them.” 

“ I believe it would. It would be a grievous waste.” 

“Vernon is a claret-man: and so is Horace De Craye. 
They are both below the mark of this wine. They will 
join the ladies. Perhaps you and I, sir, might remain 
together.” 

“ With the utmost good will on my part.” 

“ I am anxious for your verdict, sir.” 

“ You shall have it, sir, and not out of harmony with the 


AN AGED AND A GIIEAT WINE 193 

ehorus preceding me, I can predict. Cool, not frigid.” Dr. 
Middleton summed the attributes of the cellar on quitting 
it: “North side and South. No musty damp. A pure air! 
Everything requisite. One might lie down oneself and 
keep sweet here.” 

Of all our venerable British of the two Isles professing a 
suckling attachment to an ancient port-wine, lawyer, doctor, 
squire, rosy admiral, city merchant, the classic scholar is he 
whose blood is most nuptial to the webbed bottle. The 
reason must be, that he is full of the old poets. He has 
their spirit to sing with, and the best that Time has done on 
earth to feed it. He may also perceive a resemblance in 
the wine to the studious mind, which is the obverse of our 
mortality, and throws off acids and crusty particles in the pil¬ 
ing of the years, until it is fulgent by clarity. Port hymns 
to his conservatism. It is magical: at one sip he is off 
swimming in the purple flood of the ever-youthful antique. 

By comparison, then, the enjoyment of others is brutish j 
they have not the soul for it; but he is worthy of the wine, 
as are poets of Beauty. In truth, these should be severally 
apportioned to them, scholar and poet, as his own good 
thing. Let it be so. 

Meanwhile Dr. Middleton sipped. 

After the departure of the ladies, Sir Willoughby had 
practised a studied curtness upon Vernon and Horace. 

“ You drink claret,” he remarked to them, passing it 
round. “ Port, I think, Dr. Middleton ? The wine before 
you may serve for a preface. We shall have your wine in 
five minutes.” 

The claret jug empty, Sir Willoughby offered to send for 
more. De Craye was languid over the question. Vernon 
rose from the table. 

“We have a bottle of Dr. Middleton’s Port coming in,” 
Willoughby said to him. 

“ Mine, you call it ? ” cried the Rev. Doctor. 

“It’s a royal wine, that won’t suffer sharing,” said 
Vernon. 

“WeT1 be with you, if you go into the billiard-room, 
Vernon.” 

“ I shall hurry my drinking of good wine for no man,” 
said the Bsr. 


194 


THE EGOIST 


“ Horace ? ” 

« I *m beneath it, ephemeral, Willoughby. I am going 
to the ladies.” 

Vernon and De Craye retired upon the arrival of the 
wine; and Dr. Middleton sipped. He sipped and looked at 
the owner of it. 

“ Some thirty dozen ? ” he said. 

“ Fifty.” 

The Doctor nodded humbly. 

“ I shall remember, sir,” his host addressed him, “ when¬ 
ever 1 have the honour of entertaining you, I am cellarer of 
that wine.” 

The Rev. Doctor set down his glass. 94 You have, sir, in 
some sense, an enviable post. It is a responsible one, if 
that be a blessing. On you it devolves to retard the day of 
the last dozen.” 

“ Your opinion of the wine is favourable, sir ? ” 

44 I will say this : — shallow souls run to rhapsody : — 1 
will say, that I am consoled for not having lived ninety 
years back, or at any period but the present, by this one 
glass of your ancestral wine.” 

“1 am careful of it,” Sir Willoughby said modestly; 
44 still its natural destination is to those who can appreciate 
it. You do, sir.” 

44 Still, my good friend, still ! It is a charge : it is a pos¬ 
session, but part in trusteeship. Though we cannot declare 
it an entailed estate, our consciences are in some sort 
pledged that it shall be a succession not too considerably 
diminished.” 

“ You will not object to drink it, sir, to the health of your 
grandchildren. And may you live to toast them in it on 
their marriage-day! ” 

44 You colour the idea of a prolonged existence in seduc¬ 
tive hues. Ha! It is a wine for Tithonus. This wine 
would speed him to the rosy Morning — aha!” 

“1 will undertake to sit you through it up to morning,” 
said Sir Willoughby, innocent of the Bacchic nuptiality of 
the allusion. 

Dr. Middleton eyed the decanter. There is a grief in 
gladness, for a premonition of our mortal state. The 
amount of wine in the decanter did not promise to sustain 


AN AGED AND A GREAT WINE 195 

the starry roof of night and greet the dawn. “ Old wine, 
my friend, denies us the full bottle ! ” 

“ Another bottle is to follow.” 

“ No! ” 

“ It is ordered.” 

“I protest.” 

“ It is uncorked.” 

“ I entreat.” 

“ It is decanted.” 

“ I submit. But, mark, it must be honest partnership. 
You are my worthy host, sir, on that Stipulation. Note the 
superiority of wine over Venus ! — I may say, the magna¬ 
nimity of wine; our jealousy turns on him that will not 
share! But the corks, Willoughby. The corks excite my 
amazement.” 

“The corking is examined at regular intervals. I re, 
member the occurrence in my father’s time. I have seen to 
it once.” 

“It must be perilous as an operation for tracheotomy; 
which I should assume it to resemble in surgical skill and 
firmness of hand, not to mention the imminent gasp of the 
patient.” 

A fresh decanter was placed before the doctor. 

He said: “ I have but a girl to give ! ” He was melted. 

Sir Willoughby replied: “I take her for the highest prize 
this world affords.” 

“ I have beaten some small stock of Latin into her head, 
and a note of Greek. She contains a savour of the classics, 
I hoped once . . . but she is a girl. The nymph of the 
woods is in her. Still she will bring you her flower-cup of 
Hippocrene. She has that aristocracy — the noblest. She 
is fair; a Beauty, some have said, who judge not by lines. 
Fair to me, Willoughby! She is my sky. There were 
applicants. In Italy she was besought of me. She has no 
history. You are the first heading of the chapter. With 
you she will have her one tale, as it should be. ‘ Mulier 
turn bene olet,’ you know. Most fragrant she that smells 
of naught. She goes to you from me, from me alone, from 
her father to her husband. ‘Ut flos in septis secretus 
nascitur hortis.’” . . . He murmured on the lines to, “‘Sic 
▼irgo, dum. . . .’ I shall feel the parting. She goes to 


196 


THE EGOIST 


one who will have my pride in her, and more. I will 
add, who will be envied. Mr. Whitford must write you a 
Carmen Nuptiale.” 

The heart of the unfortunate gentleman listening to Dr. 
Middleton set in for irregular leaps. His offended temper 
broke away from the image of Clara, revealing her as he 
had seen her in the morning beside Horace De Craye, dis¬ 
tressingly sweet; sweet with the breezy radiance of an 
English soft-breathing day; sweet with sharpness of young 
sap. Her eyes, her lips, her fluttering dress that played 
happy mother across her bosom, giving peeps of the veiled 
twins; and her laughter, her slim figure, peerless carriage, 
all her terrible sweetness touched his wound to the smarting 
quick. 

Her wish to be free of him was his anguish. In his pain 
he thought sincerely. When the pain was easier he muffled 
himself in the idea of her jealousy of Laetitia Dale, and 
deemed the wish a fiction. But she had expressed it. That 
was the wound he sought to comfort; for the double reason, 
that he could love her better after punishing her, and that 
to meditate on doing so masked the fear of losing her — the 
dread abyss she had succeeded in forcing his nature to 
shudder at as a giddy edge possibly near, in spite of his arts 
of self-defence. 

“ What I shall do to-morrow evening! ” he exclaimed. 
“ I do not care to fling a bottle to Colonel De Craye and 
Vernon. I cannot open one for myself. To sit with the 
ladies will be sitting in the cold for me. When do you 
bring me back my bride, sir ? ” 

“ My dear Willoughby! ” The Bev. Doctor puffed, com¬ 
posed himself, and sipped. “ The expedition is an absurdity. 
I am unable to see the aim of it. She had a headache, 
vapours. They are over, and she will show a return of 
good sense. I have ever maintained that nonsense is not 
to be encouraged in girls. I can put my foot on it. My 
arrangements are for staying here a further ten days, in the 
terms of your hospitable invitation. And I stay.” 

“I applaud your resolution, sir. Will you prove firm ? 99 

“ I am never false to my engagement, Willoughby.” 

“ Hot under pressure.” 

“ Under no pressure.” 


AN AGED AND A GREAT WINE 


197 


“ Persuasion, I should have said.” 

“ Certainly not. The weakness is in the yielding, either 
to persuasion or to pressure. The latter brings weight to 
bear on us; the former blows at our want of it.” 

“ You gratify me, Dr. Middleton, and relieve me.” 

“ I cordially dislike a breach in good habits, Willoughby. 
But I do remember — was I wrong? — informing Clara that 
you appeared light-hearted in regard to a departure, or gap 
in a visit, that was not, I must confess, to my liking.” 

“ Simply, my dear Doctor, your pleasure was my pleas¬ 
ure ; but make my pleasure yours, and you remain to crack 
many a bottle with your son-in-law.” 

“ Excellently said. You have a courtly speech, Wil¬ 
loughby. I can imagine you to conduct a lover's quarrel 
with a politeness to read a lesson to well-bred damsels. 
Aha ? ” 

“ Spare me the futility of the quarrel.” 

“All’s well?” 

“Clara,” replied Sir Willoughby, in dramatic epigram, 
“is perfection.” 

“I rejoice,” the Bev. Doctor responded; taught thus to 
understand that the lover’s quarrel between his daughter 
and his host was at an end. 

He left the table a little after eleven o’clock. A short 
dialogue ensued upon the subject of the ladies. They must 
have gone to bed ? Why yes; of course they must. It is 
good that they should go to bed early to preserve their 
complexions for us. Ladies are creation’s glory, but they 
are anti-climax, following a wine of a century old. They 
are anti-climax, recoil, cross-current; morally, they are 
repentance, penance; imagerially, the frozen North on the 
young brown buds bursting to green. What know they of 
a critic in the palate, and a frame all revelry! And mark 
you, revelry in sobriety, containment in exultation: classic 
revelry. Can they, dear though they be to us, light up 
candelabras in the brain, to illuminate all history and solve 
the secret of the destiny of man ? They cannot; they can¬ 
not sympathize with them that can. So therefore this divi¬ 
sion is between us; yet are we not turbaned Orientals, nor 
are they inmates of the harem. We are not Moslem. Be 
assured of it in the contemplation of the table’s decanter. 


198 


THE EGOIST 


Dr. Middleton said: “ Then I go straight to bed.” 

“ I will conduct you to your door, sir,” said his host. 

The piano was heard. Dr. Middleton laid his hand on 
the banisters, and remarked: “ The ladies must have gone 
to bed ? ” 

Vernon came out of the library and was hailed: “Fellow- 
student ! ” 

He waved a good night to the Doctor and said to Wil¬ 
loughby : “ The ladies are in the drawing-room.” 

“ I am on my way upstairs,” was the reply. 

“ Solitude and sleep, after such a wine as that; and fore- 
fend us human society! ” the Doctor shouted. “ But, 
Willoughby! ” 

“Sir.” 

“ One to-morrow! ” 

“You dispose of the cellar, sir.” 

“I am fitter to drive the horses of the sun. I would 
rigidly counsel, one, and no more. We have made a breach 
in the fiftieth dozen. Daily one, will preserve us from 
having to name the fortieth quite so unseasonably. The 
couple of bottles per diem prognosticates disintegration, 
with its accompanying recklessness. Constitutionally, let 
me add, I bear three. I speak for posterity.” 

During Dr. Middleton’s allocution the ladies issued from 
the drawing-room, Clara foremost, for she had heard her 
father’s voice, and desired to ask him this in reference 
to their departure: “Papa, will you tell me the hour 
to-morrow ? ” 

She ran up the stairs to kiss him, saying again: “ When 
will you be ready to-morrow morning ? ” 

Dr. Middleton announced a stoutly deliberative mind in 
the bugle-notes of a repeated ahem. He bethought him of 
replying in his doctorial tongue. Clara’s eager face ad¬ 
monished him to brevity: it began to look starved. In¬ 
truding on his vision of the houris crouched in the inner 
cellar to be the reward of valiant men, it annoyed him. 
His brows joined. He said: “I shall not be ready to-mor¬ 
row morning.” 

“ In the afternoon ? ” 

“Nor in the afternoon.” 

“ When ? ” 


CLARA’S MEDITATIONS 


199 


“ My dear, I am ready for bed at this moment, and know 
of no other readiness. Ladies,” he bowed to the group in 
the hall below him, “may fair dreams pay court to you this 
night! ” 

Sir Willoughby had hastily descended and shaken the 
hands of the ladies, directed Horace De Craye to the labo¬ 
ratory for a smoking-room, and returned to Dr. Middleton. 
Vexed by the scene, uncertain of his temper if he stayed 
with Clara, for whom he had arranged that her disappoint¬ 
ment should take place on the morrow, in his absence, he 
said, u Good night, good night,” to her, with due fervour, 
bending over her flaccid finger-tips; then offered his arm to 
the Rev. Doctor. 

“ Ay, son Willoughby, in friendliness, if you will, though 
I am a man to bear my load,” the father of the stupefied 
girl addressed him. “Candles, I believe, are on the first 
landing. Good night, my love. Clara! ” 

“ Papa! ” 

“ Good night.” 

" Oh! ” she lifted her breast with the interjection, stand¬ 
ing in shame of the curtained conspiracy and herself, “ good 
night.” 

Her father wound up the stairs. She stepped down. 

“ There was an understanding that papa and I should go 
to London to-morrow early,” she said unconcernedly to the 
ladies, and her voice was clear, but her face too legible. 
De Craye was heartily unhappy at the sight. 


CHAPTER XXI 
clara’s meditations 

Two were sleepless that night: Miss Middleton and 
Colonel De Craye. 

She was in a fever, lying like stone, with her brain burn¬ 
ing. Quick natures run out to calamity in any little shadow 
of it flung before. Terrors of apprehension drive them. 
They stop not short of the uttermost when they are on the 



200 


THE EGOIST 


wings of dread. A frown means tempest, a wind wreck; 
to see fire is to be seized by it. When it is the approach of 
their loathing that they fear, they are in the tragedy of the 
embrace at a breath; and then is the wrestle between them¬ 
selves and horror ; between themselves and evil, which 
promises aid; themselves and weakness, which calls on evil; 
themselves and the better part of them, which whispers no 
beguilement. 

The false course she had taken through sophistical coward¬ 
ice appalled the girl; she was lost. The advantage taken 
of it by Willoughby put on the form of strength, and made 
her feel abject, reptilious; she was lost, carried away on 
the flood of the cataract. He had won her father for an ally. 
Strangely, she knew not how, he had succeeded in swaying 
her father, who had previously not more than tolerated him. 
“ Son Willoughby ” on her father’s lips meant something that 
scenes and scenes would have to struggle with, to the out- 
wearying of her father and herself. She revolved the “ Son 
Willoughby ” through moods of stupefaction, contempt, re¬ 
volt, subjection. It meant that she was vanquished. It 
meant that her father’s esteem for her was forfeited. She 
saw him a gigantic image of discomposure. 

Her recognition of her cowardly feebleness brought the 
brood of fatalism. What was the right of so miserable a 
creature as she to excite disturbance, let her fortunes be 
good or ill ? It would be quieter to float, kinder to every¬ 
body. Thank heaven for the chances of a short life! Once 
in a net, desperation is graceless. We may be brutes in our 
earthly destinies; in our endurance of them we need not be 
brutish. 

She was now in the luxury of passivity, when we throw 
our burden on the Powers above, and do not love them. 
The need to love them drew her out of it, that she might 
strive with the unbearable, and by sheer striving, even 
though she were graceless, come to love them humbly. It 
is here that the seed of good teaching supports a soul; for 
the condition might be mapped, and where kismet whispers 
us to shut eyes, and instruction bids us look up, is at a well- 
marked cross-road of the contest. 

Quick of sensation, but not courageously resolved, she 
perceived how blunderingly she had acted. For a punish- 


Clara's meditations 


201 


ment, it seemed to her that she who had not known her 
mind must learn to conquer her nature, and submit. Sh« 
had accepted Willoughby; therefore she accepted him. 
The fact became a matter of the past, past debating. 

In the abstract, this contemplation of circumstances went 
well. A plain duty lay in her way. And then a disem¬ 
bodied thought flew round her, comparing her with Vernon 
to her discredit. He had for years borne much that was 
distasteful to him, for the purpose of studying, and with 
his poor income helping the poorer than himself. She 
dwelt on him in pity and envy; he had lived in this place, 
and so must she; and he had not been dishonoured by his 
modesty: he had not failed of self-control, because he had 
a life within. She was almost imagining she might imitate 
him, when the clash of a sharp physical thought: “ The 
difference! the difference ! ” told her she was woman and 
never could submit. Can a woman have an inner life apart 
from him she is yoked to ? She tried to nestle deep away 
in herself: in some corner where the abstract view had 
comforted her, to flee from thinking as her feminine blood 
directed. It was a vain effort. The difference, the cruel 
fate, the defencelessness of women, pursued her, strung her 
to wild horses’ backs, tossed her on savage wastes. In her 
case duty was shame: hence, it could not be broadly duty. 
That intolerable difference proscribed the word. 

But the fire of a brain burning high and kindling every¬ 
thing, lit up herself against herself: —Was one so volatile 
as she a person with a will ? — Were they not a multitude 
of flitting wishes that she took for a will ?— Was she, feather- 
headed that she was, a person to make a stand on physical 
pride ? — If she could yield her hand without reflection (as 
she conceived she had done, from incapacity to conceive 
herself doing it reflectively), was she much better than pur- 
chaseable stuff that has nothing to say to the bargain ? 

Furthermore, said her incandescent reason, she had not 
suspected such art of cunning in Willoughby. Then might 
she not be deceived altogether — might she not have misread 
him ? Stronger than she had fancied, might he not be like¬ 
wise more estimable ? The world was favourable to him : 
lie was prized by his friends. 

She reviewed him. It was all in one flash. It was not 


202 


THE EGOIST 


much less intentionally favourable than the world's review 
and that of his friends, but, beginning with the idea of them, 
she recollected — heard Willoughby’s voice pronouncing his 
opinion of his friends and the world; of Vernon Whitford 
and Colonel De Craye, for example, and of men and women. 
An undefined agreement to have the same regard for him as 
his friends and the world had, provided that he kept at the 
same distance from her, was the termination of this phase, 
occupying about a minute in time, and reached through a 
series of intensely vivid pictures : — his face, at her petition 
to be released, lowering behind them for a background and a 
comment. 

“ I cannot! I cannot! ” she cried aloud; and it struck her 
that her repulsion was a holy warning. Better be graceless 
than a loathing wife: better appear inconsistent. Why 
should she not appear such as she was ? 

Why ? We answer that question usually in angry reliance 
on certain superb qualities, injured fine qualities of ours 
undiscovered by the world, not much more than suspected 
by ourselves, which are still our fortress, where pride sits at 
home, solitary and impervious as an octogenarian conser¬ 
vative. But it is not possible to answer it so when the brain 
is rageing like a pine-torch and the devouring illumination 
leaves not a spot of our nature covert. The aspect of her 
weakness was unrelieved, and frightened her back to her 
loathing. From her loathing, as soon as her sensations had 
quickened to realize it, she was hurled on her weakness. 
She was graceless, she was inconsistent, she was volatile, she 
was unprincipled, she was worse than a prey to wickedness 
— capable of it; she was only waiting to be misled. Nay, 
the idea of being misled suffused her with languor; for then 
the battle would be over and she a happy weed of the 
sea, no longer suffering those tugs at the roots, but leaving 
it to the sea to heave and contend. She would be like Con¬ 
stants then: like her in her fortunes : never so brave, she 
feared. 

Perhaps very like Constantia in her fortunes! 

Poor troubled bodies waking up in the night to behold 
visually the spectre cast forth from the perplexed machinery 
inside them, stare at it for a space, till touching conscious¬ 
ness they dive down under the sheets with fish-like alacrity. 


clara’s meditations 


203 

Clara looked at her thought, and suddenly headed down¬ 
ward in a crimson gulf. 

She must have obtained absolution, or else it was oblivion, 
below. Soon after the plunge, her first object of meditation 
was Colonel De Craye. She thought of him calmly : he 
seemed a refuge. He was very nice, he was a holiday char¬ 
acter. His lithe figure, neat firm footing of the stag, swift 
intelligent expression, and his ready frolicsomeness, pleasant 
humour, cordial temper, and his Irishry, whereon he was at 
liberty to play, as on the emblem harp of the Isle, were 
soothing to think of. The suspicion that she tricked herself 
with this calm observation of him was dismissed. Issuing 
out of torture, her young nature eluded the irradiating brain, 
in search of refreshment, and she luxuriated at a feast in 
considering him — shower on a parched land that he was ! 
He spread new air abroad. She had no reason to suppose 
he was not a good man: she could securely think of him. 
Besides he was bound by his prospective office in support of 
his friend Willoughby to be quite harmless. And besides 
(you are not to expect logical sequences) the showery re¬ 
freshment in thinking of him lay in the sort of assurance it 
conveyed, that the more she thought, the less would he be 
likely to figure as an obnoxious official: that is, as the man 
to do by Willoughby at the altar what her father would, 
under the supposition, be doing by her. Her mind reposed 
on Colonel De Craye. 

His name was Horace. Her father had worked with her 
at Horace. She knew most of the Odes and some of the 
Satires and Epistles of the poet. They reflected benevolent 
beams on the gentleman of the poet’s name. He too was 
vivacious, had fun, common sense, elegance; loved rusti¬ 
city, he said, sighed for a country life, fancied retiring to 
Canada to cultivate his own domain ; “ modus agri non ita 
magnus: ” a delight. And he, too, when in the country 
sighed for town. There were strong features of resem¬ 
blance. He had hinted in fun at not being rich. “ Quae 
virtus et quanta sit vivere parvo.” But that quotation 
applied to and belonged to Vernon Whitford. Even so little 
disarranged her meditations. 

She would have thought of Vernon, as her instinct of 
safety prompted, had not his exactions been excessive. He 


204 


THE EGOIST 


proposed to help her with advice only. She was to do 
everything for herself, do and dare everything, decide upon 
everything. He told her flatly that so would she learn to 
know her own mind; and flatly that it was her penance. 
She had gained nothing by breaking down and pouring her¬ 
self out to him. He would have her bring Willoughby and 
her father face to face, and be witness of their interview — 
herself the theme. What alternative was there ? — obedi¬ 
ence to the word she had pledged. He talked of patience, 
of self-examination and patience. But all of her — she was 
all marked urgent. This house was a cage, and the world — 
her brain was a cage, until she could obtain her prospect of 
freedom. 

As for the house, she might leave it; yonder was the 
dawn. 

She went to her window to gaze at the first colour along 
the grey. Small satisfaction came of gazing at that or at 
herself. She shunned glass and sky. One and the other 
stamped her as a slave in a frame. It seemed to her she 
had been so long in this place that she was fixed here: it 
was her world, and to imagine an Alp, was like seeking to 
get back to childhood. Unless a miracle intervened, here 
she would have to pass her days. Men are so little chival¬ 
rous now, that no miracle ever intervenes. Consequently 
she was doomed. 

She took a pen and began a letter to a dear friend, Lucy 
Darleton, a promised bridesmaid, bidding her countermand 
orders for her bridal dress, and purposing a tour in Switzer¬ 
land. She wrote of the mountain country with real aban¬ 
donment to imagination. It became a visioned loophole of 
escape. She rose and clasped a shawl over her night-dress 
to ward off chillness, and sitting to the table again, could 
not produce a word. The lines she had written were con¬ 
demned : they were ludicrously inefficient. The letter was 
torn to pieces. She stood very clearly doomed. 

After a fall of tears, upon looking at the scraps, she 
dressed herself, and sat by the window and watched the 
blackbird on the lawn as he hopped from shafts of dewy 
sunlight to the long-stretched dewy tree-shadows, consider¬ 
ing in her mind that dark dews are more meaningful than 
bright, the beauty of the dews of woods more sweet than 


Clara’s meditations 


205 


meadow-dews. It signified only that she was quieter. She 
had gone through her crisis in the anticipation of it. That 
is how quick natures will often be cold and hard, or not 
much moved, when the positive crisis arrives, and why it is 
that they are prepared for astonishing leaps over the grada¬ 
tions which should render their conduct comprehensible to 
us, if not excuseable. She watched the blackbird throw up 
his head stiff, and peck to right and left, dangling the worm 
each side his orange beak. Speckle-breasted thrushes were 
at work, and a wagtail that ran as with Clara’s own little 
steps. Thrush and blackbird flew to the nest. They had 
wings. The lovely morning breathed of sweet earth into 
her open window and made it painful, in the dense twitter, 
chirp, cheep, and song of the air, to resist the innocent 
intoxication. 0 to love! was not said by her, but if she 
had sung, as her nature prompted, it would have been. 
Her war with Willoughby sprang of a desire to love 
repelled by distaste. Her cry for freedom was a cry to be 
free to love: she discovered it, half-shuddering: to love, 
oh! no — no shape of man, nor impalpable nature either: 
but to love unselfishness, and helpfulness, and planted 
strength in something. Then, loving and being loved a 
little, what strength would be hers ! She could utter all the 
words needed to Willoughby and to her father, locked in 
her love : walking in this world, living in that. 

Previously she had cried, despairing: If I were loved J 
Jealousy of Constantia’s happiness, envy of her escape, 
ruled her then: and she remembered the cry, though not 
perfectly her plain-speaking to herself: she chose to think 
she had meant: If Willoughby were capable of truly lov¬ 
ing ! For now the fire of her brain had sunk, and refuges 
and subterfuges were round about it. The thought of per¬ 
sonal love was encouraged, she chose to think, for the sake 
of the strength it lent her to carve her way to freedom 
She had just before felt rather the reverse, but she could 
not exist with that feeling; and it was true that freedom 
was not so indistinct in her fancy as the idea of love. 

Were men, when they were known, like him she knew 
too well ? 

The arch-tempter’s question to her was there. 

She put it away. Wherever she turned, it stood observ- 


206 


THE EGOIST 


ing her. She knew so much of one man, nothing of the 
rest: naturally she was curious. Vernon might be sworn 
to be unlike. But he was exceptional. What of the other 
in the house ? 

/ Maidens are commonly reduced to read the masters of 
their destinies by their instincts; and when these have been 
edged by over-activity, they must hoodwink their maidenli¬ 
ness to suffer themselves to read : and then they must dupe 
their minds, else men would soon see they were gifted to 
discern. Total ignorance being their pledge of purity to 
men, they have to expunge the writing of their perceptives 
on the tablets of the brain : they have to know not when 
they do know. The instinct of seeking to know, crossed by 
the task of blotting knowledge out, creates that conflict of 
the natural with the artificial creature to which their ulti¬ 
mately-revealed double-face, complained of by ever-dissatis¬ 
fied men, is owing. Wonder in no degree that they indulge 
a craving to be fools, or that many of them act the char¬ 
acter. Jeer at them as little for not showing growth. 
You have reared them to this pitch, and at this pitch 
they have partly civilized you. Supposing you to want it 
done wholly, you must yield just as many points in your 
requisitions as are needed to let the wits of young women 
reap their due harvest and be of good use to their souls. 
You will then have a fair battle, a braver, with better 
results. / 

Clara’s inner eye traversed Colonel De Craye at a shot. 

She had immediately to blot out the vision of the Captain 
Oxford in him, the revelation of his laughing contempt for 
Willoughby, the view of mercurial principles, the scribbled 
histories of light love-passages. 

She blotted it out, kept it from her mind: so she knew 
him, knew him to be a sweeter and a variable Willoughby, 
a generous kind of Willoughby, a Willoughby-butterfly, 
without having the free mind to summarize him and 
picture him for a warning. Scattered features of him, such 
as the instincts call up, were not sufficiently impressive. 
Besides, the clouded mind was opposed to her receiving 
impressions. 

Young Crossjay’s voice in the still morning air came to 
her ears. The dear guileless chatter of the boy’s voice l 


Clara’s meditations 


207 


Why, assuredly it was young Crossjay who was the man 
she loved. And he loved her. And he was going to be an 
unselfish, sustaining, true, strong man, the man she longed 
for, for anchorage. Oh, the dear voice! woodpecker and 
thrush in one. He never ceased to chatter to Vernon Whit- 
ford walking beside him with a swinging stride off to the 
lake for their morning swim. Happy couple! The morning 
gave them both a freshness and innocence above human. 
They seemed to Clara made of morning air and clear lake- 
water. Crossjay’s voice ran up and down a diatonic scale, 
with here and there a query in semitone, and a laugh on a 
ringing note. She wondered what he could have to talk of 
so incessantly and imagined all the dialogue. He prattled 
of his yesterday, to-day and to-morrow, which did not im¬ 
ply past and future, but his vivid present. She felt like 
one vainly trying to fly in hearing him ; she felt old. The 
consolation she arrived at was to feel maternal. She wished 
to hug the boy. 

Trot and stride, Cross jay and Vernon entered the park, 
careless about wet grass, not once looking at the house. 
Crossjay ranged ahead and picked flowers, bounding back 
to show them. Clara’s heart beat at a fancy that her 
name was mentioned. If those flowers were for her she 
would prize them! 

The two bathers dipped over an undulation. 

Her loss of them rattled her chains. 

Deeply dwelling on their troubles has the effect upon the 
young of helping to forgetfulness; for they cannot think 
without imagining, their imaginations are saturated with 
their pleasures, and the collision, though they are unable 
to exchange sad for sweet, distils an opiate. 

“ Am I solemnly engaged ? ” she asked herself. She 
seemed to be awakening. 

She glanced at her bed, where she had passed the night 
of ineffectual moaning; and out on the high wave of grass, 
where Crossjay and his good friend had vanished. 

Was the struggle all to be gone over again ? 

Little by little her intelligence of her actual position 
crept up to submerge her heart. 

“ I am in his house ! ” she said. It resembled a discovery, 
so strangely had her opiate and power of dreaming wrought 


208 


THE EGOIST 


through her tortures. She said it gasping. She was in his 
house, his guest, his betrothed, sworn to him. The fact 
stood out cut in steel on the pitiless daylight. 

That consideration drove her to be an early wanderer in 
the wake of Crossjay. 

Her station was among beeches on the flank of the 
boy’s return; and while waiting there, the novelty of 
her waiting to waylay any one — she who had played the 
contrary part! — told her more than it pleased her to 
think. Yet she could admit that she did desire to speak 
with Vernon, as with a counsellor, harsh and curt, but 
wholesome. 

The bathers reappeared on the grass-ridge, racing and 
flapping wet towels. 

Some one hailed them. A sound of the galloping hoof 
drew her attention to the avenue. She saw Willoughby 
dash across the park-level, and dropping a word to Vernon, 
ride away. Then she allowed herself to be seen. 

Crossjay shouted. Willoughby turned his head, but not 
his horse’s head. The boy sprang up to Clara. He had 
swum across the lake and back; he had raced Mr. Whitford 
— and beaten him ! How he wished Miss Middleton had 
been able to be one of them ! 

Clara listened to him enviously. Her thought was: We 
women are nailed to our sex 1 

She said : “ And you have just been talking to Sir Wil¬ 
loughby.” 

Cross jay drew himself up to give an imitation of the 
baronet’s hand-waving in adieu. 

He would not have done that, had he not smelt sympathy 
with the performance. 

She declined to smile. Crossjay repeated it, and laughed. 
He made a broader exhibition of it to Vernon approaching: 
“ I say, Mr. Whitford, who’s this ? ” 

Vernon doubled to catch him. Cross jay fled and resumed 
his magnificent air in the distance. 

" Good morning, Miss Middleton; you are out early,” 
said Vernon, rather pale and stringy from his cold swim, 
and rather hard-eyed with the sharp exercise following it. 

She had expected some of the kindness she wanted to 
reject, for he could speak very kindly, and she regarded him 


CLARA’S MEDITATIONS 


209 


as her doctor of medicine, who would at least present the 
futile drug. 

“ Good morning,” she replied. 

“ Willoughby will not be home till the evening.” 

“You could not have had a finer morning for your 
bath” 

“No.” 

“I will walk as fast as you like.” 

“ I’m perfectly warm.” 

“ But you prefer fast walking.” 

“ Out.” 

“ Ah ! yes, that I understand. The walk back! Why i.« 
Willoughby away to-day ? ” 

“ He has business.” 

After several steps, she said: “He makes very sure of 
papa.” 

“Not without reason, you will find,” said Vernon. 

“Can it be ? I am bewildered. I had papa’s promise.” 

“ To leave the Hall for a day or two.” 

“ It would have been . . 

“ Possibly. But other heads are at work as well as yours. 
If you had been in earnest about it, you would have taken 
your father into your confidence at once. That was the 
course I ventured to propose, on the supposition.” 

“ In earnest! I cannot imagine that you doubt it. I 
wished to spare him.” 

“ This is a case in which he can’t be spared.” 

“ If I had been bound to any other ! I did not know then 
who held me a prisoner. I thought I had only to speak to 
him sincerely.” 

“Not many men would give up their prize for a word; 
Willoughby the last of any.” 

“ Prize ” rang through her thrillingly from Vernon’s 
mouth, and soothed her degradation. 

She would have liked to protest that she was very little 
of a prize ; a poor prize ; not one at all in general esti¬ 
mation ; only one to a man reckoning his property; no 
prize in the true sense. 

The importunity of pain saved her. 

“ Does he think I can change again ? Am I treated as 
something won in a lottery ? To stay here is indeed, indeed, 


210 


THE EGOIST 


more than I can bear. And if he is calculating — Mr. Wliit- 
ford, if he calculates on another change, his plotting to keep 
me here is inconsiderate, not very wise. Changes may 
occur in absence.” 

u Wise or not, he has the right to scheme his best to keep 
you.” 

She looked on Vernon with a shade of wondering reproach. 

“ Why ? What right ? ” 

“ The right you admit when you ask him to release 
you. He has the right to think you deluded; and to think 
you may come to a better mood if you remain — a mood 
more agreeable to him, I mean. He has that right abso¬ 
lutely. You are bound to remember also that you stand 
in the wrong. You confess it when you appeal to his 
generosity. And every man has the right to retain a 
treasure in his hand if he can. Look straight at these 
facts.” 

“ You expect me to be all reason! ” 

“ Try to be. It’s the way to learn whether you are 
really in earnest.” 

“ I will try. It will drive me to worse ! ” 

“ Try honestly. What is wisest now is, in my opinion, 
for you to resolve to stay. I speak in the character of the 
person you sketched for yourself as requiring. Well, then, 
a friend repeats the same advice. You might have gone 
with your father: now you will only disturb him and annoy 
him. The chances are, he will refuse to go.” 

“Are women ever so changeable as men, then? Papa 
consented; he agreed; he had some of my feeling; I saw 
it. That was yesterday. And at night! He spoke to 
each of us at night in a different tone from usual. With 
me he was hardly affectionate. But when you advise me 
to stay, Mr. Whitford, you do not perhaps reflect that it 
would be at the sacrifice of all candour.” 

“ Regard it as a probational term.” 

“It has gone too far with me.” 

“ Take the matter into the head: try the case flbere.” 

“ Are you not counselling me as if I were a woman of 
intellect ? ” 

The crystal ring in her yoice told him that tears were 
near to flowing. 


THE HIDE 


211 


He shuddered slightly. “You have intellect,” he said, 
nodded, and crossed the lawn, leaving her. He had to 
dress. 

She was not permitted to feel lonely, for she was imme¬ 
diately joined by Colonel De Craye. 


CHAPTER XXII 

THE RIDE 

Cross jay darted up to her a nose ahead of the colonel. 

" I say, Miss Middleton, we ’re to have the whole day to 
ourselves, after morning lessons. Will you come and fish 
with me and see me bird’s-nest ? ” 

“ Not for the satisfaction of beholding another cracked 
crown, my son,” the colonel interposed: and bowing to 
Clara: “ Miss Middleton is handed over to my exclusive 
charge for the day — with her consent ? ” 

“ I scarcely know,” said she, consulting a sensation of 
languor that seemed to contain some reminiscence. “ If I 
am here. My father’s plans are uncertain. I will speak to 
him. If I am here, perhaps Cross jay would like a ride in 
the afternoon.” 

“ Oh! yes,” cried the boy ; “ out over Bournden, through 
Mewsey up to Closham beacon, and down on Aspenwell, 
where there’s a common for racing. And ford the 
stream! ” 

“ An inducement for you,” De Craye said to her. 

She smiled and squeezed the boy’s hand. 

“We won’t go without you, Crossjay.” 

“ You don’t carry a comb, my man, when you bathe ? ” 

At this remark of the colonel’s, young Crossjay conceived 
the appearance of his matted locks in the eyes of his ador¬ 
able lady. He gave her one dear look through his redness, 
and fled. 

“ I like that boy,” said De Craye. 

“ I love him,” said Clara. 

Crossjay’s troubled eyelids in his honest young face 
became a picture for her. 



212 


THE EGOIST 


“ After all, Miss Middleton, Willoughby’s notions about 
him are not so bad, if we consider that you will be in the 
place of a mother to him.” 

" I think them bad.” 

" You are disinclined to calculate the good fortune of the 
boy in having more of you on land than he would have in 
crown and anchor buttons ! ” 

" You have talked of him with Willoughby.” 

“ We had a talk last night.” 

Of how much ? thought she. 

“ Willoughby returns ? ” she said. 

" He dines here, I know ; for he holds the key of the 
inner cellar, and Dr. Middleton does him the honour to 
applaud his wine. Willoughby was good enough to tell 
me that he thought I might contribute to amuse you.” 

She was brooding in stupefaction on her father and the 
wine as she requested Colonel De Craye to persuade Wil¬ 
loughby to take the general view of Cross jay’s future and 
act on it. 

“ He seems fond of the boy, too ! ” said De Craye 
musingly. 

“ You speak in doubt ? ” 

" Hot at all. But is he not — men are queer fish ! — make 
allowance for us — a trifle tyrannical, pleasantly, with those 
he is fond of ? ” 

“ If they look right and left ? ” 

It was meant for an interrogation: it was not with the 
sound of one that the words dropped. " My dear Cross¬ 
jay ! ” she sighed. “ I would willingly pay for him out of 
my own purse, and I will do so rather than have him miss 
his chance. I have not mustered resolution to propose it.” 

“ I may be mistaken, Miss Middleton. He talked of the 
boy’s fondness of him.” 

“ He would.” 

“ I suppose he is hardly peculiar in liking to play Pole- 
star.” 

" He may not be.” 

" For the rest, your influence should be all powerful.” 

"It is not.” 

De Craye looked with a wandering eye at the heavens. 

“ We are having a spell of weather perfectly superb. 


THE RIDE 


213 


And the odd thing is, that whenever we have splendid 
weather at home we ’re all for rushing abroad. I’m booked 
for a Mediterranean cruise — postponed to give place to 
your ceremony.” 

“ That ? ” she could not control her accent. 

“ What worthier ? ” 

She was guilty of a pause. 

De Craye saved it from an awkward length. “I have 
written half an essay on Honeymoons, Miss Middleton.” 

et Is that the same as a half-written essay, Colonel De 
Craye ? ” 

“ Just the same, with the difference that it’s a whole 
essay written all on one side.” 

“ On which side ? ” 

“ The bachelor’s.” 

“ Why does he trouble himself with such topics ! ” 

“ To warm himself for being left out in the cold.” 

“ Does he feel envy ? ” 

“ He has to confess it.” 

“ He has liberty.” 

“ A commodity he can’t tell the value of if there’s no one 
to buy.” 

“ Why should he wish to sell ? ” 

“ He’s bent on completing his essay.” 

“ To make the reading dull.” 

“ There we touch the key of the subject. For what is 
to rescue the pair from a monotony multiplied by two ? 
And so a bachelor’s recommendation, when each has dis¬ 
covered the right sort of person to be dull with, pushes 
them from the Church door on a round of adventures con¬ 
taining a spice of peril, if ’t is to be had. Let them be in 
danger of their lives the first or second day. A bachelor’s 
loneliness is a private affair of his own; he has n’t to look 
into a face to be ashamed of feeling it and inflicting it at 
the same time; ’t is his pillow; he can punch it an he 
pleases, and turn it over t’ other side, if he’s for a mighty 
variation ; there’s a dream in it. But our poor couple are 
staring wide awake. All their dreaming’s done. They’ve 
emptied their bottle of elixir, or broken it; and she has a 
thirst for the use of the tongue, and he to yawn with a 
crony $ and they may converse, they ’re not aware of it. 


214 


THE EGOIST 


more than the desert that has drunk a shower. So as soon 
as possible she’s away to the ladies, and he puts on his 
Club. That’s what your bachelor sees and would like to 
spare them; and if he didn’t see something of the sort 
he’d be off with a noose round his neck, on his knees in the 
dew to the morning milkmaid.” 

“ The bachelor is happily warned and on his guard,” said 
Clara, diverted, as he wished her to be. “ Sketch me a few 
of the adventures you propose.” 

“ I have a friend who rowed his bride from the Houses of 
Parliament up the Thames to the Severn on into North 
Wales. They shot some pretty weirs and rapids.” 

“That was nice.” 

“ They had an infinity of adventures, and the best proof 
of the benefit they derived is, that they forgot everything 
about them except that the adventures occurred.” 

“ Those two must have returned bright enough to please 
you.” 

“ They returned, and shone like a wrecker’s beacon to the 
mariner. You see, Miss Middleton, there was the landscape, 
and the exercise, and the occasional bit of danger. I think 
it’s to be recommended. The scene is always changing, 
and not too fast; and ’t is not too sublime, like big moun¬ 
tains, to tire them of their everlasting big Ohs. There’s 
the difference between going into a howling wind, and 
launching among zephyrs. They have fresh air and move¬ 
ment, and not in a railway carriage; they can take in what 
they look on. And she has the steering ropes, and that’s 
a wise commencement. And my lord is all day making an 
exhibition of his manly strength, bowing before her some 
dozen to the minute; and she, to help him, just inclines 
when she’s in the mood. And they ’re face to face, in the 
nature of things, and are not under the obligation of looking 
the unutterable, because, you see, there’s business in hand; 
and the boat’s just the right sort of third party, who never 
interferes, but must be attended to. And they feel they ’re 
labouring together to get along, all in the proper propor¬ 
tion ; and whether he has to labour in life or not, he proves 
his ability. What do you think of it, Miss Middleton? ” 

“ I think you have only to propose it, Colonel De Craye.” 

“And if they capsize, why, ’tis a natural ducking! ” 


THE RIDE 


215 


“You forgot the lady’s dressing-bagv” 

“ The stain on the metal for a constant reminder of his 
prowess in saving it! Well, and there’s an alternative to 
that scheme and a finer : — This, then: they read dramatic 
pieces during courtship, to stop the saying of things over 
again till the drum of the ear becomes nothing but a drum 
to the poor head, and a little before they affix their signa¬ 
tures to the fatal Registry-book of the vestry, they enter 
into an engagement with a body of provincial actors to join 
the troop on the day of their nuptials, and away they go in 
their coach and four, and she is Lady Kitty Caper for a 
month, and he Sir Harry Highflyer. See the honeymoon 
spinning! The marvel to me is, that none of the young 
couples do it. They could enjoy the world, see life, amuse 
the company, and come back fresh to their own characters, 
instead of giving themselves a dose of Africa without a 
savage to diversify it: an impression they never get over, 
I’m told. Many a character of the happiest auspices has 
irreparable mischief done it by the ordinary honeymoon. 
For my part, I rather lean to the second plan of campaign.” 

Clara was expected to reply, and she said: “ Probably 
because you are fond of acting. It would require capacity 
on both sides.” 

“ Miss Middleton, I would undertake to breathe the en¬ 
thusiasm for the stage and the adventure.” 

“ You are recommending it generally.” 

“Let my gentleman only have a fund of enthusiasm. 
The lady will kindle. She always does at a spark.” 

“ If he has not any ? ” 

“Then I’m afraid they must be mortally dull.” 

She allowed her silence to speak ; she knew that it did so 
too eloquently, and could not control the personal adumbra- 
tion she gave to the one point of light revealed in, “ if he 
has not any.” Her figure seemed immediately to wear a 
cap and cloak of dulness. 

She was full of revolt and anger, she was burning with 
her situation; if sensible of shame now at anything that 
she did, it turned to wrath and threw the burden on the 
author of her desperate distress. The hour for blaming 
herself had gone by, to be renewed ultimately perhaps in a 
season of freedom. She was bereft of her insight within at 


216 


THE EGOIST 


present, so blind to herself, that while conscious of an accu¬ 
rate reading of Willoughby’s friend, she thanked him in 
her heart for seeking simply to amuse her and slightly 
succeeding. The afternoon’s ride with him and Crossjay 
was an agreeable beguilement to her in prospect. 

Lsetitia came to divide her from Colonel De Craye. Dr. 
Middleton was not seen before his appearance at the break¬ 
fast-table, where a certain air of anxiety in his daughter’s 
presence produced the semblance of a raised map at intervals 
on his forehead. Few sights on earth are more deserving of 
our sympathy than a good man who has a troubled con¬ 
science thrust on him. 

The Rev. Doctor’s perturbation was observed. The ladies 
Eleanor and Isabel, seeing his daughter to be the cause of 
it, blamed her and would have assisted him to escape, but 
Miss Dale, whom he courted with that object, was of the 
opposite faction. She made way for Clara to lead her father 
out. He called to Vernon, who merely nodded while leaving 
the room by the window with Crossjay. 

Half an eye on Dr. Middleton’s pathetic exit in captivity 
sufficed to tell Colonel De Craye that parties divided the 
house. At first he thought how deplorable it would be to 
lose Miss Middleton for two days or three: and it struck him 
that Vernon Whitford and Lsetitia Dale were acting oddly 
in seconding her, their aim not being discernible. For he 
was of the order of gentlemen of the obscurely-clear in mind, 
who have a predetermined acuteness in their watch upon the 
human play, and mark men and women as pieces of a bad 
game of chess, each pursuing an interested course. His ex¬ 
perience of a section of the world had educated him — as gal¬ 
lant, frank, and manly a comrade as one could wish for — up 
to this point. But he soon abandoned speculations, which 
may be compared to a shaking of the anemometer, that will 
not let the troubled indicator take station. Reposing on his 
perceptions and his instincts, he fixed his attention on the 
chief persons, only glancing at the others to establish a pos¬ 
tulate, that where there are parties in a house, the most 
bewitching person present is the origin of them. It is ever 
Helen’s achievement. Miss Middleton appeared to him be¬ 
witching beyond mortal; sunny in her laughter, shadowy in 
her smiling; a young lady shaped for perfect music with a 
lover. 


THE RIDE 


217 


She was -chat, and no less, to every man’s eye on earth. 
High breeding did not freeze her lovely girlishness. — But 
Willoughby did. This reflection intervened to blot luxurious 
picturings of her, and made itself acceptable by leading him 
back to several instances of an evident want of harmony of 
the pair. 

And now (for purely undirected impulse all within us is 
not, though we may be eye-bandaged agents under direction) 
it became necessary for an honourable gentleman to cast 
vehement rebukes at the fellow who did not comprehend the 
jewel he had won. How could Willoughby behave like so 
complete a donkey ! De Craye knew him to be in his interior 
stiff, strange, exacting : women had talked of him ; he had 
been too much for one woman — the dashing Constantia: he 
had worn one woman, sacrificing far more for him than Con¬ 
stantia, to death. Still, with such a prize as Clara Middle- 
ton, Willoughby’s behaviour was past calculating in its con¬ 
temptible absurdity. And during courtship ! And courtship 
of that girl ! It was the way of a man ten years after 
rnarriage. 

The idea drew him to picture her doatingly in her young 
matronly bloom ten years after marriage : without a touch 
of age, matronly wise, womanly sweet: perhaps with a 
couple of little ones to love, never having known the love 
of a man. 

To think of a girl like Clara Middleton never having, at 
nine and twenty, and with two fair children ! known the love 
of a man, or the loving of a man, possibly, became torture to 
the Colonel. 

For a pacification, he had to reconsider that she was as 
yet only nineteen and unmarried. 

But she was engaged and she was unloved. One might 
swear to it, that she was unloved. And she was not a girl 
to be satisfied with a big house and a high-nosed husband. 

There was a rapid alteration of the sad history of Clara 
the unloved matron solaced by two little ones. A childless 
Clara tragically loving and beloved, flashed across the dark 
glass of the future. 

Either way her fate was cruel. 

Some astonishment moved De Craye in the contemplation 
of the distance he had stepped in this morass of fanc}\ He 


218 


THE EGOIST 


distinguished the choice open to him of forward or back, and 
he selected forward. But fancy was dead : the poetry hov¬ 
ering about her grew invisible to him : he stood in the 
morass; that was all he knew; and momently he plunged 
deeper; and he was aware of an intense desire to see her 
face, that he might study her features again : he understood 
no more. 

It was the clouding of the brain by the man’s heart, 
which had come to the knowledge that it was caught. 

A certain measure of astonishment moved him still. It 
had hitherto been his portion to do mischief to women and 
avoid the vengeance of the sex. What was there in Miss 
Middleton’s face and air to ensnare a veteran handsome man 
of society numbering six and thirty years, nearly as many 
conquests ? “ Each bullet has got its commission.” He 

was hit at last. That accident effected by Mr. Flitch had 
fired the shot. Clean through the heart, does not tell us of 
our misfortune till the heart is asked to renew its natural 
beating. It fell into the condition of the porcelain vase 
over a thought of Miss Middleton standing above his pros¬ 
trate form on the road, and walking beside him to the Hall. 
Her words ? What have they been ? She had not uttered 
words, she had shed meanings. He did not for an instant 
conceive that he had charmed her: the charm she had cast 
on him was too thrilling for coxcombry to lift a head; still 
she had enjoyed his prattle. In return for her touch upon 
the Irish fountain in him, he had manifestly given her relief. 
And could not one see that so sprightly a girl would soon 
be deadened by a man like Willoughby ? Deadened she 
was: she had not responded to a compliment on her 
approaching marriage. An allusion to it killed her smil¬ 
ing. The case of Mr. Flitch, with the half-wager about his 
reinstation in the service of the Hall, was conclusive evi¬ 
dence of her opinion of Willoughby. 

It became again necessary that he should abuse Wil¬ 
loughby for his folly. Why was the man worrying her ? 
In some way he was worrying her. 

What if Willoughby as well as Miss Middleton wished 
to be quit of the engagement ? . . . 

For just a second, the handsome woman-flattered officer 
proved his man’s heart more whole than he supposed it. 


THE BIDE 219 

That great organ, instead of leaping at the thought, suf¬ 
fered a check. 

Bear in mind, that his heart was not merely man’s, it was 
a conqueror’s. He was of the race of amorous heroes who 
glory in pursuing, overtaking, subduing: wresting the prize 
from a rival, having her ripe from exquisitely feminine 
inward conflicts, plucking her out of resistance in good old 
primitive fashion. You win the creature in her delicious 
flutterings. He liked her thus, in cooler blood, because of 
society’s admiration of the capturer, and somewhat because 
of the strife, which always enhances the value of a prize, 
and refreshes our vanity in recollection. 

Moreover, he had been matched against Willoughby: the 
circumstance had occurred two or three times. He could 
name a lady he had won, a lady he had lost. Willoughby’s 
large fortune and grandeur of style had given him advan¬ 
tages at the start. But the start often means the race — 
with women, and a bit of luck. 

The gentle check upon the gallopping heart of Colonel De 
Craye endured no longer than a second — a simple side- 
glance in a headlong pace. Clara’s enchantingness for a 
temperament like his, which is to say, for him specially, in 
part through the testimony her conquest of himself pre¬ 
sented as to her power of sway over the universal heart 
known as man’s, assured him she was worth winning even 
from a hand that dropped her. 

He had now a double reason for exclaiming at the folly 
of Willoughby. Willoughby’s treatment of her showed 
either temper or weariness. Vanity and judgement led De 
Craye to guess the former. Regarding her sentiments for 
Willoughby, he had come to his own conclusion. The cer¬ 
tainty of it caused him to assume that he possessed an 
absolute knowledge of her character: she was an angel, 
born supple; she was a heavenly soul, with half a dozen of 
the tricks of earth. Skittish filly, was among his phrases; 
but she had a bearing and a gaze that forbade the dip in 
the common gutter for wherewithal to paint the creature 
she was. 

Now, then, to see whether he was wrong for the first 
time in his life! If not wrong, he had a chance. 

There could be nothing dishonourable in rescuing a gii* 


220 


THE EGOIST 


from an engagement she detested. An attempt to think it 
a service to Willoughby failed midway. De Craye dis¬ 
missed that chicanery. It would be a service to Wil¬ 
loughby in the end, without question. There was that to 
soothe his manly honour. Meanwhile he had to face the 
thought of Willoughby as an antagonist, and the world 
looking heavy on his honour as a friend. 

Such considerations drew him tenderly close to Miss 
Middleton. It must, however be confessed that the mental 
ardour of Colonel De Craye had been a little sobered by his 
glance at the possibility of both of the couple being of one 
mind on the subject of their betrothal. Desirable as it was 
that they should be united in disagreeing, it reduced the 
romance to platitude, and the third person in the drama to 
the appearance of a stick. No man likes to play that part. 
Memoirs of the favourites of Goddesses, if we had them, 
would confirm it of men’s tastes in this respect, though the 
divinest be the prize. We behold what part they played. 

De Craye happened to be crossing the hall from the labora¬ 
tory to the stables when Clara shut the library-door behind 
her. He said something whimsical, and did not stop, nor 
did he look twice at the face he had been longing for. 

What he had seen made him fear there would be no ride 
out with her that day. Their next meeting reassured him ; 
she was dressed in her riding habit and wore a countenance 
resolutely cheerful. He gave himself the word of command 
to take his tone from her. 

He was of a nature as quick as Clara’s. Experience 
pushed him farther than she could go in fancy; but expe¬ 
rience laid a sobering finger on his practical steps, and bade 
them hang upon her initiative. She talked little. Young 
Crossjay cantering ahead was her favourite subject. She 
was very much changed since the early morning: his liveli¬ 
ness, essayed by him at a hazard, was unsuccessful; grave 
English pleased her best. The descent from that was 
naturally to melancholy. She mentioned a regret she had 
that the Veil was interdicted to women in Protestant coun¬ 
tries. De Craye was fortunately silent; he could think of 
no other veil than the Moslem, and when her meaning 
struck his witless head, he admitted to himself that devout 
attendance on a young lady’s mind stupefies man’s intei- 


THE RIDE 


221 


ligence. Half an hour later, he was as foolish in supposing 
it a confidence. He was again saved by silence. 

In Aspenwell village she drew a letter from her bosom 
and called to Crossjay to post it. The boy sang out: “ Miss 
Lucy Darleton ! What a nice name ! ” 

Clara did not show that the name betrayed anything. 

She said to De Craye: " It proves he should not be here 
thinking of nice names.” 

Her companion replied: “ You may be right.” He added, 
to avoid feeling too subservient: “ Boys will.” 

“ Not if they have stern masters to teach them their daily 
lessons, and some of the lessons of existence.” 

“Vernon Whitford is not stern enough? ” 

“ Mr. Whitford has to contend with other influences 
here.” 

“ With Willoughby ? ” 

“Not with Willoughby.” 

He understood her. She touched the delicate indication 
firmly. The man’s heart respected her for it; not many 
girls could be so thoughtful or dare to be so direct; he saw 
that she had become deeply serious, and he felt her love of 
the boy to be maternal, past maiden sentiment. 

By this light of her seriousness, the posting of her letter 
in a distant village, not entrusting it to the Hall post-box, 
might have import; not that she would apprehend the* viola¬ 
tion of her private correspondence, but we like to see our 
letter of weighty meaning pass into the mouth of the public 
box. 

Consequently this letter was important. It was to sup¬ 
pose a sequency in the conduct of a variable damsel. 
Coupled with her remark about the Veil, and with other 
things, not words, breathing from her (which were the 
breath of her condition), it was not unreasonably to be sup¬ 
posed. She might even be a very consistent person. If one 
only had the key of her! 

She spoke once of an immediate visit to London, supposing 
that she could induce her father to go. De Craye remem¬ 
bered the occurrence in the hall at night, and her aspect of 
distress. 

They raced along Aspenwell Common to the ford; shallow, 
to the chagrin of young Crossjay, between whom and them- 


222 


THE EGOIST 


selves they left a fitting space for his rapture in leading his 
pony to splash up and down, lord of the stream. 

Swiftness of motion so strikes the blood on the brain that 
our thoughts are lightnings, the heart is master of them. 

De Craye was heated by his gallop to venture on the 
angling question: “ Am I to hear the names of the brides¬ 
maids ? ” 

The pace had nerved Clara to speak to it sharply : “ There 
is no need.” 

“ Have I no claim ? ” 

She was mute. 

“ Miss Lucy Darleton, for instance; whose name I am 
almost as much in love with as Cross jay.” 

“ She will not be bridesmaid to me.” 

“ She declines ? Add my petition. I beg.” 

“ To all ? or to her ? ” 

“ Do all the bridesmaids decline ? ” 

“The scene is too ghastly.” 

“ A marriage ? ” 

“ Girls have grown sick of it.” 

“ Of weddings ? We *11 overcome the sickness.” 

“With some.” 

“Not with Miss Darleton ? You tempt my eloquence.” 

“You wish it ? ” 

“To win her consent ? Certainly.” 

“ The scene ! ” 

“ Do I wish that ? ” 

“Marriage!” exclaimed Clara, dashing into the ford, 
fearful of her ungovernable wildness and of what it might 
have kindled. — You, father! you have driven me to un- 
maidenliness ! — She forgot Willoughby in her father, who 
would not quit a comfortable house for her all but prostrate 
beseeching; would not bend his mind to her explanations, 
answered her with the horrid iteration of such deaf mis¬ 
understanding as may be associated with a tolling bell. 

De Craye allowed her to catch Cross jay by herself. They 
entered a narrow lane, mysterious with possible birds’ eggs 
in the May-green hedges. As there was not room for three 
abreast, the colonel made up the rearguard, and was consoled 
by having Miss Middleton’s figure to contemplate; but the 
readiness of her joining in Crossjay’s pastime of the nest- 


TEMPER AND POLICE 


223 


hunt was not so pleasing to a man that she had wound to 
a pitch of excitement. Her scornful accent on “ Marriage ” 
rang through him. Apparently she was beginning to do 
with him just as she liked, herself entirely unconcerned. 

She kept Crossjay beside her till she dismounted, and the 
colonel was left to the procession of elephantine ideas in his 
head, whose ponderousness he took for natural weight. We 
do not with impunity abandon the initiative. Men who 
have yielded it are like cavalry put on the defensive ; a very 
small force with an ictus will scatter them. 

Anxiety to recover lost ground reduced the dimensions of 
his ideas to a practical standard. 

Two ideas were opposed like duellists bent on the slaugh¬ 
ter of one another. Either she amazed him by confirming 
the suspicions he had gathered of her sentiments for Wil¬ 
loughby in the moments of his introduction to her; or she 
amazed him as a model for coquettes : — the married and 
the widowed might apply to her for lessons. 

These combatants exchanged shots, but remained stand¬ 
ing : the encounter was undecided. Whatever the result, 
no person so seductive as Clara Middleton had he ever met. 
Her cry of loathing, “ Marriage ! ,! coming from a girl, rang 
faintly clear of an ancient virginal aspiration of the sex to 
escape from their coil, and bespoke a pure cold savage pride 
that transplanted his thirst for her to higher fields. 


CHAPTER XXIII 

TREATS OF THE UNION OF TEMPER AND POLICY 

Sir Willoughby meanwhile was on a line of conduct 
suiting his appreciation of his duty to himself. He had 
deluded himself with the simple notion that good fruit 
would come of the union of temper and policy. 

No delusion is older, none apparently so promising, both 
parties being eager for the alliance. Yet, the theorists upon 
human nature will say, they are obviously of adverse dis¬ 
position. And this is true, inasmuch as neither of them will 



224 


THE EGOIST 


submit to the yoke of an established union ; as soon as they 
have done their mischief, they set to work tugging for a 
divorce. But they have attractions, the one for the other, 
which precipitate them to embrace whenever they meet in a 
breast; each is earnest with the owner of it to get him to 
officiate forthwith as wedding-priest. And here is the reason : 
temper, to warrant its appearance, desires to be thought as 
deliberative as policy ; and policy, the sooner to prove its 
shrewdness, is impatient for the quick blood of temper. 

It will be well for men to resolve at the first approaches 
of the amorous but fickle pair upon interdicting even an 
accidental temporary junction: for the astonishing sweet¬ 
ness of the couple when no more than the ghosts of them 
have come together in a projecting mind is an intoxication 
beyond fermented grapejuice or a witch’s brewage; and 
under the guise of active wits they will lead us to the 
parental meditation of antics compared with which a 
Pagan Saturnalia were less impious in the sight of sanity. 
This is full-mouthed language; but on our studious way 
through any human career we are subject to fits of moral 
elevation; the theme inspires it, and the sage residing in 
every civilized bosom approves it. 

Decide at the outset, that temper is fatal to policy: hold 
them with both hands in division. One might add, be 
doubtful of your policy and repress your temper: it would 
be to suppose you wise. You can however, by incorporat¬ 
ing two or three captains of the great army of truisms 
bequeathed to us by ancient wisdom, fix in your service 
those veteran old standfasts to check you. They will not 
be serviceless in their admonitions to your understanding, 
and they will so contrive to reconcile with it the natural 
caperings of the wayward young sprig Conduct, that the 
latter, who commonly learns to walk upright and straight 
from nothing softer than raps of a bludgeon on his crown, 
shall foot soberly, appearing at least wary of dangerous 
corners. 

Now Willoughby had not to be taught that temper is 
fatal to policy; he was beginning to see in addition that 
the temper he encouraged was particularly obnoxious to 
the policy he adopted; and although his purpose in mount¬ 
ing horse after yesterday frowning on his bride was defi- 


TEMPER AND POLICY 


225 


nite, and might be deemed sagacious, he bemoaned already 
the fatality pushing him ever farther from her in chase of 
a satisfaction impossible to grasp. 

But the bare fact that her behaviour demanded a line 
of policy crossed the grain of his temper: it was very 
offensive. 

Considering that she wounded him severely, her reversal 
of their proper parts, by taking the part belonging to him, 
and requiring his watchfulness, and the careful dealings 
he was accustomed to expect from others and had a right 
to exact of her, was injuriously unjust. The feelings of a 
man hereditarily sensitive to property accused her of a 
trespassing impudence, and knowing himself, by testimony 
of his household, his tenants and the neighbourhood, and 
the world as well, amiable when he received his dues, he 
contemplated her with an air of stiff-backed ill-treatment, 
not devoid of a certain sanctification of martyrdom. 

His bitterest enemy would hardly declare that it was he 
who was in the wrong. 

Clara herself had never been audacious enough to say 
that. Distaste of his person was inconceivable to the 
favourite of society. The capricious creature probably 
wanted a whipping to bring her to the understanding of 
the principle called mastery, which is in man. 

But was he administering it? If he retained a hold 
on her, he could undoubtedly apply the scourge at leisure; 
any kind of scourge; he could shun her, look on her 
frigidly, unbend to her to find a warmer place for sarcasm, 
pityingly smile, ridicule, pay court elsewhere. He could 
do these things if he retained a hold on her; and he 
could do them well because of the faith he had in his re¬ 
nowned amiability; for in doing them, he could feel that 
he was other than he seemed, and his own cordial nature 
was there to comfort him while he bestowed punishment. 
Cordial indeed, the chills he endured were flung from the 
world. His heart was in that fiction: half the hearts now 
beating have a mild form of it to keep them merry: and 
the chastisement he desired to inflict was really no more 
than righteous vengeance for an offended goodness of 
heart. Clara figuratively, absolutely perhaps, on her 
knees, he would raise her and forgive her. He yearned 


226 


THE EGOIST 


for the situation. To let her understand how little she had 
known him! It would be worth the pain she had dealt, 
to pour forth the stream of re-established confidences, to 
paint himself to her as he was; as he was in the spirit, 
not as he was to the world: though the world had reason 
to do him honour. 

First, however, she would have to be humbled. 

Something whispered that his hold on her was lost. 

In such a case, every blow he struck would set her flying 
farther, till the breach between them would be past bridging. 

Determination not to let her go, was the best finish to 
this perpetually revolving round which went like the same 
old wheel-planks of a water-mill in his head at a review 
of the injury he sustained. He had come to it before, and 
he came to it again. There was his vengeance. It melted 
him, she was so sweet! She shone for him like the suuny 
breeze on water. Thinking of her caused a catch of his 
breath. 

The dreadful young woman had a keener edge for the 
senses of men than sovereign beauty. 

It would be madness to let her go. 

She affected him like an outlook on the great Patterne 
estate after an absence, when his welcoming flag wept for 
pride above Patterne Hall. 

It would be treason to let her go* 

It would be cruelty to her. 

He was bound to reflect that she was of tender age, and 
the foolishness of the wretch was excuseable to extreme 
youth. 

We toss away a flower that we are tired of smelling and 
do not wish to carry. But the rose — young woman — is 
not cast off with impunity. A fiend in shape of man is 
always behind us to appropriate her. He that touches 
that rejected thing is larcenous. Willoughby had been 
sensible of it in the person of Laetitia: and by all the more 
that Clara’s charms exceeded the faded creature’s, he felt 
it now. Ten thousand Furies thickened about him at a 
thought of her lying by the roadside without his having 
crushed all bloom and odour out of her which might tempt 
even the curiosity of the fiend, man. 

On the other hand, supposing her to lie there untouched. 


TEMPER AND POLICY 


227 


universally declined by the sniffing sagacious dog-fiend, a 
miserable spinster for years, he could conceive notions of 
his remorse. A soft remorse may be adopted as an agree¬ 
able sensation within view of the wasted penitent whom 
we have struck a trifle too hard. Seeing her penitent, he 
certainly would be willing to surround her with little 
offices of compromising kindness. It would depend on her 
age. Supposing her still youngish, there might be capti¬ 
vating passages between them; as thus, in a style not un¬ 
familiar, — 

“ And was it my fault, my poor girl ? Am I to blame, 
that you have passed a lonely unloved youth ? ” 

“No, Willoughby; the irreparable error was mine, the 
blame is mine, mine only. I live to repent it. I do not 
seek, for I have not deserved, your pardon. Had I it, I 
should need my own self-esteem to presume to clasp it to 
a bosom ever unworthy of you.” 

“I may have been impatient, Clara: we are human!” 

“ Never be it mine to accuse one on whom I laid so heavy 
a weight of forbearance! ” 

“Still, my old love! —for I am merely quoting history 
in naming you so — I cannot have been perfectly blameless.” 

“To me you were, and are.” 

“Clara!” 

“ Willoughby!” 

“Must I recognize the bitter truth that we two, once 
nearly one! so nearly one! are eternally separated ? ” 

“ I have envisaged it. My friend — I may call you 
friend: you have ever been my friend, my best friend ! 
Oh, that eyes had been mine to know the friend I had ! 
— Willoughby, in the darkness of night, and during days 
that were as night to my soul, I have seen the inexorable 
finger pointing my solitary way through the wilderness 
from a Paradise forfeited by my most wilful, my wanton, 
sin. We have met. It is more than I have merited. We 
part. In mercy let it be for ever. Oh, terrible word ! 
Coined by the passions of our youth, it comes to us for our 
sole riches when we are bankrupt of earthly treasures, 
and is the passport given by Abnegation unto Woe that 
prays to quit this probationary sphere. Willoughby, we 
part. It is better so.” 


228 


THE EGOIST 


“Clara! one — one only — one last — one holy kiss ! 99 

“If these poor lips, that once were sweet to you . . 

The kiss, to continue the language of the imaginative 
composition of his time, favourite readings in which had 
inspired Sir Willoughby with a colloquy so pathetic, was 
imprinted. 

Ay, she had the kiss, and no mean one. It was in¬ 
tended to swallow every vestige of dwindling attractive¬ 
ness out of her, and there was a bit of scandal springing 
of it in the background that satisfactorily settled her 
business, and left her “enshrined in memory, a divine 
recollection, to him,” as his popular romances would say, 
and have said for years. 

.Unhappily, the fancied salute of her lips encircled him 
with the breathing Clara. She rushed up from vacancy 
like a wind summoned to wreck a stately vessel. 

His reverie had thrown him into severe commotion. 
The slave of a passion thinks in a ring, as hares run: he 
will cease where he began. Her sweetness had set him off, 
and he whirled back to her sweetness: and that being in¬ 
calculable and he insatiable, you have the picture of his 
torments when you consider that her behaviour made her 
as a cloud to him. 

Riding slack, horse and man, in the likeness of those 
two ajog homeward from the miry hunt, the horse pricked 
his ears, and Willoughby looked down from his road along 
the hills on the race headed by young Crossjay with a short 
start over Aspenwell Common to the ford. There was no 
mistaking who they were, though they were well-nigh a 
mile distant below. He noticed that they did not over¬ 
take the boy. They drew rein at the ford, talking not 
simply face to face, but face in face. Willoughby’s novel 
feeling of he knew not what drew them up to him, en¬ 
abling him to fancy them bathing in one another’s eyes. 
Then she sprang through the ford, De Craye following, 
but not close after — and why not close ? She had flicked 
him with oue of her peremptorily saucy speeches when 
she was bold with the gallop. They were not unknown 
to Willoughby. They signified intimacy. 

Last night he had proposed to De Craye to take Miss 
Middleton for a ride the next afternoon. It never came 


TEMPER AND POLICY 


22S 


to his mind then that he and his friend had formerly been 
rivals. He wished Clara to be amused. Policy dictated 
that every thread should be used to attach her to her 
residence at the Hall until he could command his temper 
to talk to her calmly and overwhelm her, as any man in 
earnest, with command of temper and a point of vantage, 
may be sure to whelm a young woman. Policy, adulter¬ 
ated by temper, yet policy it was that had sent him on his 
errand in the early morning to beat about for a house and 
garden suitable to Dr. Middleton within a circuit of five, 
six, or seven miles of Patterne Hall. If the Kev. Doctor 
liked the house and took it (and Willoughby had seen the 
place to suit him), the neighbourhood would be a chain 
upon Clara: and if the house did not please a gentleman 
rather hard to please (except in a venerable wine), an ex¬ 
cuse would have been started for his visiting other houses, 
and he had the response to his importunate daughter, that 
he believed an excellent house was on view. Dr. Middle- 
ton had been prepared by numerous hints to meet Clara’s 
black misreading of a lover’s quarrel, so that everything 
looked full of promise as far as Willoughby’s exercise of 
policy went. 

But the strange pang traversing him now convicted him 
of a large adulteration of profitless temper with it. The 
loyalty of De Craye to a friend, where a woman walked in 
the drama, was notorious. It was there, and a most flexi¬ 
ble thing it was: and it soon resembled reason manipulated 
by the sophists. Not to have reckoned on his peculiar 
loyalty was proof of the blindness cast on us by temper. 

And De Craye had an Irish tongue; and he had it under 
control, so that he could talk good sense and airy nonsense 
at discretion. The strongest overboiling of English Puri¬ 
tan contempt of a gabbler would not stop women from 
liking it. Evidently Clara did like it, and Willoughby 
thundered on her sex. Unto such brainless things as 
these do we, under the irony of circumstances, confide our 
honour! 

For he was no gabbler. He remembered having rattled 
in earlier days; he had rattled with an object to gain, 
desiring to be taken for an easy, careless, vivacious, charm¬ 
ing fellow, as any young gentleman may be who gaily 


230 


THE EGOIST 


wears the golden dish of Fifty thousand pounds per annum 
nailed to the back of his very saintly young pate. The 
growth of the critical spirit in him, however, had informed 
him that slang had been a principal component of his rat¬ 
tling; and as he justly supposed it a betraying art for his 
race and for him, he passed through the prim and the 
yawning phases of affected indifference, to the pure Puri¬ 
tanism of a leaden contempt of gabblers. 

They snare women, you see — girls! How despicable 
the host of girls ! — at least, that girl below there ! 

Married women understood him: widows did. He 
placed an exceedingly handsome and flattering young widow 
of his acquaintance, Lady Mary Lewison, beside Clara for 
a comparison, involuntarily; and at once, in a flash, in 
despite of him (he would rather it had been otherwise), 
and in despite of Lady Mary’s high birth and connections 
as well, the silver lustre of the maid sicklied the poor 
widow. 

The effect of the luckless comparison was to produce an 
image of surpassingness in the features of Clara that gave 
him the final, or mace-blow. Jealousy invaded him. 

He had hitherto been free of it, regarding jealousy as a 
foreign devil, the accursed familiar of the vulgar. Luck¬ 
less fellows might be victims of the disease; he was not; 
and neither Captain Oxford, no,r Vernon, nor De Craye, 
nor any of his compeers, had given him one shrewd pinch: 
the woman had, not the man; and she in quite a different 
fashion from his present wallowing anguish: she had never 
pulled him to earth’s level, where jealousy gnaws the 
grasses. He had boasted himself above the humiliating 
visitation. 

If that had been the case, we should not have needed to 
trouble ourselves much about him. A run or two with the 
pack of imps would have satisfied us. But he desired 
Clara Middleton manfully enough at an intimation of 
rivalry to be jealous; in a minute the foreign devil had 
him, he was flame: flaming verdigris, one might almost 
dare to say, for an exact illustration; such was actually 
the colour; but accept it as unsaid. 

Kemember the poets upon Jealousy. It is to be haunted 
in the heaven of two by a Third; preceded or succeeded, 


TEMPER AND POLICY 


231 


therefore surrounded, embraced, hugged by this infernal 
Third: it is Love’s bed of burning marl; to see and taste 
the withering Third in the bosom of sweetness; to be 
dragged through the past and find the fair Eden of it 
sulphurous; to be dragged to the gates of the future and 
glory to behold them blood: to adore the bitter creature 
trebly and with treble power to clutch her by the windpipe: 
it is to be cheated, derided, shamed, and abject and sup¬ 
plicating, and consciously demoniacal in treacherousness, 
and victoriously self-justified in revenge. 

And still there is no change in what men feel, though in 
what they do the modern may be judicious. 

You know the many paintings of man transformed to 
rageing beast by the curse: and this, the fieriest trial of 
our egoism, worked in the Egoist to produce division of 
himself from himself, a concentration of his thoughts 
upon another object, still himself, but in another breast, 
which had to be looked at and into for the discovery of 
him. By the gaping jaw-chasm of his greed we may gather 
comprehension of his insatiate force of jealousy. Let her 
go ? Not though he were to become a mark of public scorn 
in strangling her with the yoke ! His concentration was 
marvellous. Unused to the exercise of imaginative 
powers, he nevertheless conjured her before him visually 
till his eyeballs ached. He saw none but Clara, hated 
none, loved none, save the intolerable woman. What 
logic was in him deduced her to be individual and most 
distinctive from the circumstance that only she had ever 
wrought these pangs. She had made him ready for them, 
as we know. An idea of De Craye being no stranger to her 
when he arrived at the Hall, dashed him at De Craye for 
a second: it might be or might not be that they had a 
secret; — Clara was the spell. So prodigiously did he love 
and hate, that he had no permanent sense except for her. 
The soul of him writhed under her eyes at one moment, 
and the next it closed on her without mercy. She was his 
possession escaping; his own gliding away to the Third. 

There would be pangs for him too, that Third! Stand¬ 
ing at the altar to see her fast-bound, soul and body, to 
another, would be good roasting fire. 

It would be good roasting fire for her too, should she be 


232 


THE EGOIST 


averse. To conceive her aversion was to burn her and 
devour her. She would then be his! — what say you ? 
Burnt and devoured! Rivals would vanish then. Her 
reluctance to espouse the man she was plighted to, would 
cease to be uttered, cease to be felt. 

At last he believed in her reluctance. All that had been 
wanted to bring him to the belief was the scene on the 
common; such a mere spark, or an imagined spark! But 
the presence of the Third was necessary; otherwise he 
would have had to suppose himself personally distasteful. 

Women have us back to the conditions of primitive man, 
or they shoot us higher than the topmost star. But it is 
as we please. Let them tell us what we are to them: for 
us, they are our back and front of life: the poet’s Lesbia, 
the poet’s Beatrice; ours is the choice. And were it 
proved that some of the bright things are in the pay of 
Darkness, with the stamp of his coin on their palms, and 
that some are the very angels we hear sung of, not the 
less might we say that they find us out, they have us by 
our leanings. They are to us what we hold of best or 
worst within. By their state is our civilization judged: 
and if it is hugely animal still, that is because primitive 
men abound and will have their pasture. Since the lead 
is ours, the leaders must bow their heads to the sentence. 
Jealousy of a woman, is the primitive egoism seeking to 
refine in a blood gone to savagery under apprehension of 
an invasion of rights; it is in action the tiger threatened 
by a rifle when his paw is rigid on quick flesh; he tears 
the flesh for rage at the intruder. The Egoist, who is our 
original male in giant form, had no bleeding victim be¬ 
neath his paw, but there was the sex to mangle. Much as 
he prefers the well-behaved among women, who can wor¬ 
ship and fawn, and in whom terror can be inspired, in his 
wrath he would make of Beatrice a Lesbia Quadrantaria. 

Let women tell us of their side of the battle. We are 
not so much the test of the Egoist in them as they to us. 
Movements of similarity shown in crowned and undiademed 
ladies of intrepid independence, suggest their occasional 
capacity to be like men when it is given to them to hunt. 
At present they fly, and there is the difference. Our man' 
ner of the chase informs them of the creature we are. 


TEMPER AND POLICY 


233 


Dimly as young women are informed, they have a youth¬ 
ful ardour of detestation that renders them less tolerant of 
the Egoist than their perceptive elder sisters. What they 
do perceive, however, they have a redoubtable grasp of, 
and Clara’s behaviour would be indefensible if her detec¬ 
tive feminine vision might not sanction her acting on its 
direction. Seeing him as she did, she turned from him 
and shunned his house as the antre of an ogre. She had 
posted her letter to Lucy Darleton. Otherwise, if it had 
been open to her to dismiss Colonel De Craye, she might, 
with a warm kiss to Vernon’s pupil, have seriously 
thought of the next shrill steam-whistle across yonder 
hills for a travelling companion on the way to her friend 
Lucy; so abhorrent was to her the putting of her horse’s 
head toward the Hall. Oh, the breaking of bread there! 
It had to be gone through for another day and more: that 
is to say, forty hours, it might be six and forty hours 
and no prospect of sleep to speed any of them on wings ! 

Such were Clara’s inward interjections while poor Wil¬ 
loughby burnt himself out with verdigris flame having the 
savour of bad metal, till the hollow of his breast was not 
unlike to a corroded old cuirass found, we will assume, by 
criminal lantern-beams in a digging beside green-mantled 
pools of the sullen soil, lumped with a strange adhesive 
concrete. How else picture the sad man ? — the cavity felt 
empty to him, and heavy; sick of an ancient and mortal 
combat, and burning; deeply-dinted too: 

With the starry hole 

Whence fled the soul: 

very sore; impotent for aught save sluggish agony; a 
specimen and the issue of strife. 

Measurelessly to loathe was not sufficient to save him 
from pain: he tried it: nor to despise; he went to a depth 
there also. The fact that she was a healthy young 
woman, returned to the surface of his thoughts like the 
murdered body pitched into the river, which will not 
drown and calls upon the elements of dissolution to float 
it. His grand hereditary desire to transmit his estates, 
wealth and name to a solid posterity, while it prompted 
him in his loathing and contempt of a nature mean and 


234 


THE EGOIST 


ephemeral compared with his, attached him desperately to 
her splendid healthiness. The council of elders, whose 
descendant he was, pointed to this young woman for his 
mate. He had wooed her with the idea that they con¬ 
sented. O she was healthy ! And he likewise ; but, as if 
it had been a duel between two clearly designated by 
quality of blood to bid a House endure, she was the first 
who taught him what it was to have sensations of his 
mortality. 

He could not forgive her. It seemed to him conse¬ 
quently politic to continue frigid and let her have a fur¬ 
ther taste of his shadow, when it was his burning wish 
to strain her in his arms to a flatness provoking his 
compassion. 

“ You have had your ride ? ” he addressed her politely in 
the general assembly on the lawn. 

“I have had my ride, yes,” Clara replied. 

“ Agreeable, I trust?” 

“Very agreeable.” 

So it appeared. Oh, blushless! 

The next instant he was in conversation with Laetitia, 
questioning her upon a dejected droop of her eyelashes. 

“Iam, I think,” said she, “constitutionally melancholy.” 

He murmured to her: “I believe in the existence of 
specifics, and not far to seek, for all our ailments except 
those we bear at the hands of others.” 

She did not dissent. 

De Craye, whose humour for being convinced that Wil¬ 
loughby cared about as little for Miss Middleton as she 
for him was nourished by his immediate observation of 
them, dilated on the beauty of the ride and his fair com¬ 
panion’s equestrian skill. 

“You should start a travelling circus,” Willoughby 
rejoined. 

“But the idea ’s a worthy one! — There’s another alter¬ 
native to the expedition I proposed, Miss Middleton,” said 
De Craye. “And I be clown? I haven’t a scruple of 
objection. I must read up books of jokes.” 

“Don’t,” said Willoughby. 

“I’d spoil my part! But a natural clown won’t keep 
up an artificial performance for an entire month, you see; 


THE GENEROSITY OF WILLOUGHBY 


235 


which is the length of time we propose. He ’ll exhaust 
his nature in a day and be bowled over by the dullest 
regular donkey-engine with paint on his cheeks and a 
nodding-topknot.” 

“ What is this expedition ‘ we 9 propose ? ” 

De Craye was advised in his heart to spare Miss Middle- 
ton any allusion to honeymoons. 

“ Merely a game to cure dulness.” 

“Ah,” Willoughby acquiesced. “A month, you said?” 

“ One ’d like it to last for years ! 99 

“Ah! You are driving one of Mr. Merriman’s witti¬ 
cisms at me, Horace; I am dense.” 

Willoughby bowed to Dr. Middleton and drew him from 
Vernon, filially taking his arm to talk with him closely. 

De Craye saw Clara’s look as her father and Willoughby 
went aside thus linked. 

It lifted him over anxieties and casuistries concerning 
loyalty. Powder was in the look to make a warhorse 
breathe high and shiver for the signal. 


CHAPTER XXIV 

CONTAINS AN INSTANCE OF THE GENEROSITY OF 
WILLOUGHBY 

Observers of a gathering complication and a character 
in action commonly resemble gleaners who are intent only 
on picking up the ears of grain and huddling their store. 
Disinterestedly or interestedly they wax over-eager for 
the little trifles, and make too much of them. Observers 
should begin upon the precept, that not all we see is worth 
hoarding, and that the things we see are to be weighed in 
the scale with what we know of the situation, before we 
commit ourselves to a measurement. And they may be 
accurate observers without being good judges. They do 
not think so, and their bent is to glean hurriedly and form 
conclusions as hasty, when their business should be sift 
at each step, and question. 



236 


THE EGOIST 


Miss Dale seconded Vernon Whitford in the occupation 
of counting looks and tones, and noting scraps of dialogue. 
She was quite disinterested; he quite believed that he 
was; to this degree they were competent for their post; 
and neither of them imagined they could be personally 
involved in the dubious result of the scenes they witnessed. 
They were but anxious observers, diligently collecting. 
She fancied Clara susceptible to his advice: he had fan¬ 
cied it, and was considering it one of his vanities. Each 
mentally compared Clara’s abruptness in taking them into 
her confidence with her abstention from any secret word 
since the arrival of Colonel De Craye. Sir Willoughby 
requested Laetitia to give Miss Middleton as much of her 
company as she could; showing that he was on the alert. 
Another Constantia Durham seemed beating her wings for 
flight. The suddenness of the evident intimacy between 
Clara and Colonel De Craye shocked Laetitia: their ac¬ 
quaintance could be computed by hours. Yet at their first 
interview she had suspected the possibility of worse than 
she now supposed to be; and she had begged Vernon not 
immediately to quit the Hall, in consequence of that faint 
suspicion. She had been led to it by meeting Clara and 
De Craye at her cottage-gate, and finding them as fluent 
and laughter-breathing in conversation as friends. Un¬ 
able to realize the rapid advance to a familiarity, more 
ostensible than actual, of two lively natures, after such 
an introduction as they had undergone: and one of the two 
pining in a drought of liveliness: Laetitia listened to their 
wager of nothing at all — a no against a yes — in the case 
of poor Elitch; and Clara’s, “Willoughby will not for¬ 
give : ” and De Craye’s, “ Oh! he’s human: ” and the 
silence of Clara: and De Craye’s hearty cry, “Flitch 
shall be a gentleman’s coachman in his old seat again, or 
I have n’t a tongue! ” to which there was a negative of 
Clara’s head: — and it then struck Laetitia that this young 
betrothed lady, whose alienated heart acknowledged no 
lord an hour earlier, had met her match, and, as the 
observer would have said, her destiny. She judged of the 
alarming possibility by the recent revelation to herself of 
Miss Middleton’s character, and by Clara’s having spoken 
to a man as well (to Vernon), and previously. That a 


THE GENEROSITY OF WILLOUGHBY 


237 


young lady should speak on the subject of the inner holies 
to a man, though he were Vernon Whitford, was incredible 
to Lsetitia; but it had to be accepted as one of the dread 
facts of our inexplicable life, which drag our bodies at 
their wheels and leave our minds exclaiming. Then, if 
Clara could speak to Vernon, which Lsetitia would not have 
done for a mighty bribe, she could speak to De Craye, 
Lsetitia thought deductively: this being the logic of un¬ 
trained heads opposed to the proceeding whereby their 
condemnatory deduction hangs. — Clara must have spoken 
to De Craye! 

Lsetitia remembered how winning and prevailing Miss 
Middleton could be in her confidences. A gentleman 
hearing her might forget his duty to his friend, she 
thought, for she had been strangely swayed by Clara: 
ideas of Sir Willoughby that she had never before ima¬ 
gined herself to entertain, had been sown in her, she 
thought; not asking herself whether the searchingness of 
the young lady had struck them and bidden them rise from 
where they lay embedded. Very gentle women take in 
that manner impressions of persons, especially of the wor¬ 
shipped person, wounding them; like the new fortifications 
with embankments of soft earth, where explosive missiles 
bury themselves harmlessly until they are plucked out; 
and it may be a reason why those injured ladies outlive a 
Clara Middleton similarly battered. 

Vernon less than Laetitia took into account that Clara 
was in a state of fever, scarcely reasonable. Her confi¬ 
dences to him he had excused, as a piece of conduct, in 
sympathy with her position. He had not been greatly 
astonished by the circumstances confided; and, on the 
whole, as she was excited and unhappy, he excused her 
thoroughly; he could have extolled her: it was natural 
that she should come to him, brave in her to speak so 
frankly, a compliment that she should condescend to treat 
him as a friend. Her position excused her widely. But 
she was not excused for making a confidential friend of De 
Craye. There was a difference. 

Well, the difference was, that De Craye had not the 
smarting sense of honour with women which our medita¬ 
tor had: an impartial iudiciary, it will be seen: and he 


238 


THE EGOIST 


discriminated between himself and the other justly: but 
sensation surging to his brain at the same instant, he 
reproached Miss Middleton for not perceiving that differ¬ 
ence as clearly, before she betrayed her position to De 
Craye, which Vernon assumed that she had done. Of 
course he did. She had been guilty of it once: why, then, 
in the mind of an offended friend, she would be guilty of 
it twice. There was evidence. Ladies, fatally predes¬ 
tined to appeal to that from which they have to be guarded, 
must expect severity when they run off their railed high¬ 
road: justice is out of the question: man’s brains might, 
his blood cannot administer it to them. By chilling him 
to the bone, they may get what they cry for. But that is a 
method deadening to their point of appeal. 

In the evening Miss Middleton and the colonel sang a 
duet. She had of late declined to sing. Her voice was 
noticeably firm. Sir Willoughby said to her, “You have 
recovered your richness of tone, Clara.” She smiled and 
appeared happy in pleasing him. He named a Trench 
ballad. She went to the music-rack and gave the song 
unasked. He should have been satisfied, for she said to 
him at the finish: “Is that as you like it?” He broke 
from a murmur to Miss Dale: “Admirable.” Some one 
mentioned a Tuscan popular canzone. She waited for 
Willoughby’s approval, and took his nod for a mandate. 

Traitress ! he could have bellowed. 

He had read of this characteristic of caressing obedience 
of the women about to deceive. He had in his time prof¬ 
ited by it. 

“ Is it intuitively or by their experience that our neigh¬ 
bours across Channel surpass us in the knowledge of your 
sex?” he said to Miss Dale and talked through Clara’s 
apostrophe to the “Santissima Virgine Maria,” still treat¬ 
ing temper as a part of policy, without any effect on Clara; 
and that was matter for sickly green reflections. The 
lover who cannot wound has indeed lost anchorage; he is 
woefully adrift: he stabs air, which is to stab himself. 
Her complacent proof-armour bids him know himself 
supplanted. 

During the short conversational period before the ladies 
retired for the night, Miss Eleanor alluded to the wedding 


THE GENEROSITY OF WILLOUGHBY 


239 


by chance. Miss Isabel replied to her, and addressed an 
interrogation to Clara. De Craye foiled it adroitly. Clara 
did not utter a syllable. Her bosom lifted to a wavering 
height and sank. Subsequently she looked at De Craye, 
vacantly, like a person awakened, but she looked. She 
was astonished by his readiness, and thankful for the 
succour. Her look was cold, wide, unfixed, with nothing 
of gratitude or of personal in it. The look however 
stood too long for Willoughby’s endurance. Ejaculating, 
“Porcelain! ” he uncrossed his legs: a signal for the ladies 
Eleanor and Isabel to retire. Vernon bowed to Clara as 
she was rising. He had not been once in her eyes, and 
he expected a partial recognition at the good-night. She 
said it, turning her head to Miss Isabel, who was condol¬ 
ing once more with Colonel De Craye over the ruins of his 
wedding-present, the porcelain vase, which she supposed 
to have been in Willoughby’s mind when he displayed 
the signal. Vernon walked off to his room, dark as one 
smitten blind: bile tumet jecur: her stroke of neglect hit 
him there where a blow sends thick obscuration upon eye¬ 
balls and brain alike. 

Clara saw that she was paining him and regretted it 
when they were separated. That was her real friend! But 
he prescribed too hard a task. Besides she had done every¬ 
thing he demanded of her, except the consenting to stay 
where she was and wear out Willoughby, whose dexterity 
wearied her small stock of patience. She had vainly tried 
remonstrance and supplication with her father hoodwinked 
by his host, she refused to consider how: through wine ? 
— the thought was repulsive. 

Nevertheless she was drawn to the edge of it by the con¬ 
templation of her scheme of release. If Lucy Darleton 
was at home: if Lucy invited her to come: if she flew to 
Lucy: oh! then her father would have cause for anger. 
He would not remember that but for hateful wine ! . . . 

What was there in this wine of great age which expelled 
reasonableness, fatherliness ? He was her dear father: 
she was his beloved child: yet something divided them; 
something closed her father’s ears to her: and could it be 
that incomprehensible seduction of the wine ? Her duti¬ 
fulness cried violently no. She bowed, stupefied, to his 


240 


THE EGOIST 


arguments for remaining awhile, and rose clear-headed 
and rebellious with the reminiscence of the many strong 
reasons she had urged against them. 

The strangeness of men, young and old, the little things 
(she regarded a grand wine as a little thing) twisting and 
changing them, amazed her. And these are they by 
whom women are abused for variability! Only the moat 
imperious reasons, never mean trifles, move women, thought 
she. Would women do an injury to one they loved for 
oceans of that — ah! pah! 

And women must respect men. They necessarily respect 
a father. “My dear, dear father! ” Clara said in the soli¬ 
tude of her chamber, musing on all his goodness, and she 
endeavoured to reconcile the desperate sentiments of the 
position he forced her to sustain, with those of a venerat¬ 
ing daughter. The blow which was to fall on him beat on 
her heavily in advance. “I have not one excuse!” she 
said, glancing at numbers and a mighty one. But the idea 
of her father suffering at her hands cast her down lower 
than self-justification. She sought to imagine herself 
sparing him. It was too fictitious. 

The sanctuary of her chamber, the pure white room so 
homely to her maidenly feelings, whispered peace, only to 
follow the whisper with another that went through her 
swelling to a roar, and leaving her as a string of music un¬ 
kindly smitten. If she stayed in this house her chamber 
would no longer be a sanctuary. Dolorous bondage! 
Insolent death is not worse. Death’s worm we cannot 
keep away, but when he has us we are numb to dishonour, 
happily senseless. 

Youth weighed her eyelids to sleep, though she was 
quivering, and quivering she awoke to the sound of her 
name beneath her window. “I can love still, for I love 
him,” she said, as she luxuriated in young Crossjay’s 
boy’s voice, again envying him his bath in the lake waters, 
which seemed to her to have the power to wash away grief 
and chains. Then it was that she resolved to let Crossjay 
see the last of her in this place. He should be made 
gleeful by doing her a piece of service; he should escort 
her on her walk to the railway station next morning, 
thence be sent flying for a long day’s truancy, with a little 


THE GENEKOSITY OF WILLOUGHBY 24? 

note of apology on liis behalf that she would write for him 
to deliver to Vernon at night. 

Crossjay came running to her after his breakfast with 
Mrs. Montague, the housekeeper, to tell her he had called 
her up. 

“ You won’t to-morrow: I shall be up far ahead of you,” 
said she; and musing on her father, while Crossjay vowed 
to be up the first, she thought it her duty to plunge into 
another expostulation. 

Willoughby had need of Vernon on private affairs. Dr. 
Middleton betook himself as usual to the library, after 
answering, “ I will ruin you yet,” to Willoughby’s liberal 
offer to despatch an order to London for any books he 
might want. 

His fine unruffled air, as of a mountain in still morning 
beams, made Clara not indisposed to a preliminary scene 
with Willoughby that might save her from distressing 
him, but she could not stop Willoughby; as little could 
she look an invitation. He stood in the hall, holding 
Vernon by the arm. She passed him; he did not speak, 
and she entered the library. 

“ What now, my dear ? what is it ? ” said Dr. Middleton, 
seeing that the door was shut on them. 

“Nothing, papa,” she replied calmly. 

“You’ve not locked the door, my child ? You turned 
something there: try the handle.” 

“I assure you, papa, the door is not locked.” 

“Mr. Whitford will be here instantly. We are engaged 
on tough matter. Women have not, and opinion is uni¬ 
versal that they never will have, a conception of the value 
of time.” 

“We are vain and shallow, my dear papa.” 

“No, no, not you, Clara. But I suspect you to require 
to learn by having work in progress how important is . . . 
is a quiet commencement of the day’s task. There is not 
a scholar who will not tell you so. We must have a 
retreat. These invasions! — So you intend to have another 
ride to-day ? They do you good. To-morrow we dine 
with Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, an estimable person 
indeed, though I do not perfectly understand our accept¬ 
ing.— You have not to accuse me of sitting over wine 


242 


THE EGOIST 


last night, my Clara! I never do it, unless I am appealed 
to for my judgement upon a wine.” 

“I have come to entreat you to take me away, papa.” 

In the midst of the storm aroused by this renewal of 
perplexity, Dr. Middleton replaced a book his elbow had 
knocked over in his haste to dash the hair off his forehead, 
crying: “ Whither ? To what spot ? That reading of 
Guide-books, and idle people’s notes of Travel, and pictur¬ 
esque correspondence in the newspapers, unsettles man and 
maid. My objection to the living in hotels is known. I 
do not hesitate to say that I do cordially abhor it. I have 
had penitentially to submit to it in your dear mother’s 
time, Ktn TpLo-KaKoSaifiuv up to the full ten thousand times. 
But will you not comprehend that to the older man his 
miseries are multiplied by his years! But is it utterly 
useless to solicit your sympathy with an old man, Clara ? ” 

“General Darleton will take us in, papa.” 

“His table is detestable. I say nothing of that; but his 
wine is poison. Let that pass — I should rather say, let it 
not pass! — but our political views are not in accord. 
True, we are not under the obligation to propound them in 
presence, but we are destitute of an opinion in common. 
We have no discourse. Military men have produced, or 
diverged in, noteworthy epicures: they are often devout; 
they have blossomed in lettered men: they are gentlemen; 
the country rightly holds them in honour; but, in fine, 
I reject the proposal to go to General Darleton. —Tears ?” 

“No, papa.” 

“I do hope not. Here we have everything man can 
desire; without contest, an excellent host. You have 
your transitory tea-cup tempests, which you magnify to 
hurricanes, in the approved historic manner of the book 
of Cupid. And all the better; I repeat, it is the better 
that you should have them over in the infancy of the 
alliance. Come in!” Dr. Middleton shouted cheerily in 
response to a knock at the door. 

He feared the door was locked: he had a fear that his 
daughter intended to keep it locked. 

“Clara!” he cried. 

She reluctantly turned the handle, and the ladies 
Eleanor and Isabel came in, apologizing with as much 


THE GENEROSITY OF WILLOUGHBY 


243 


coherence as Dr. Middleton ever expected from their sex. 
They wished to speak to Clara, but they declined to take 
her away. In vain the Eev. Doctor assured them she was 
at their service; they protested that they had very few 
words to say and would not intrude one moment further 
than to speak them. 

Like a shy deputation of young scholars before the 
master, these very words to come were preceded by none 
at all; a dismal and trying pause; refreshing however to 
Dr. Middleton, who joyfully anticipated that the ladies 
could be induced to take away Clara when they had 
finished. 

“We may appear to you a little formal,” Miss Isabel 
began, and turned to her sister. 

“We have no intention to lay undue weight on our 
mission, if mission it can be called,” said Miss Eleanor. 

“Is it entrusted to you by Willoughby ?” said Clara. 

“Dear child, that you may know it all the more earnest 
with us, and our personal desire to contribute to your 
happiness: therefore does Willoughby entrust the speaking 
of it to us.” 

Hereupon the sisters alternated in addressing Clara, and 
she gazed from one to the other, piecing fragments of empty 
signification to get the full meaning when she might. 

“ — And in saying your happiness, dear Clara, we have 
our Willoughby's in view, which is dependent on yours.” 

“ — And we never could sanction that our own inclina¬ 
tions should stand in the way.” 

“ — No. We love the old place: and if it were only our 
punishment for loving it too idolatrously, we should deem 
it ground enough for our departure.” 

“—Without, really, an idea of unkindness; none, not 
any.” 

“ — Young wives naturally prefer to be undisputed 
queens of their own establishment.” 

“ — Youth and age!” 

“But I,” said Clara, “have never mentioned, never had 
a thought ...” 

“ — You have, dear child, a lover who in his solicitude 
for your happiness both sees what you desire and what 
is due to you.” 


244 


THE EGOIST 


“—And for us, Clara, to recognize what is due to you 
is to act on it.” 

“ — Besides, dear, a sea-side cottage has always been 
one of our dreams.” 

“—We have not to learn that we are a couple of old 
maids, incongruous associates for a young wife in the 
government of a great house.” 

“—With our antiquated notions, questions of domestic 
management might arise, and with the best will in the 
world to be harmonious ! . . .” 

“ — So, dear Clara, consider it settled.” 

“ — From time to time gladly shall we be your guests.” 

“ — Your guests, dear, not censorious critics.” 

“ And you think me such an Egoist! — dear ladies! The 
suggestion of so cruel a piece of selfishness wounds me. 
I would not have had you leave the Hall. I like your 
society; I respect you. My complaint, if I had one, would 
be, that you do not sufficiently assert yourselves. I could 
have wished you to be here for an example to me. I 
would not have allowed you to go. What can he think 
me! — Did Willoughby speak of it this morning ?” 

It was hard to distinguish which was the completer dupe 
of these two echoes of one another in worship of a family 

“Willoughby,” Miss Eleanor presented herself to be 
stamped with the title hanging ready for the first that 
should open her lips, “our Willoughby is observant — he 
is ever generous — and he is not less forethoughtful. His 
arrangement is for our good on all sides.” 

“An index is enough,” said Miss Isabel, appearing in 
her turn the monster dupe. 

“You will not have to leave, dear ladies. Were I mis¬ 
tress here I should oppose it.” 

“Willoughby blames himself for not reassuring you 
before.” 

“Indeed we blame ourselves for not undertaking to 
go.” 

“Did he speak of it first this morning ? ” said Clara; but 
she could draw no reply to that from them. They resumed 
the duet, and she resigned herself to have her ears boxed 
with nonsense. 


THE GENEROSITY OF "WILLOUGHBY 


245 


u So, it is understood ? ” said Miss Eleanor. 

“ I see your kindness, ladies. ” 

“ And I am to be Aunt Eleanor again ? 99 

“ And I Aunt Isabel ? ” 

Clara could have wrung her hands at the impediment 
which prohibited her delicacy from telling them why she 
could not name them so, as she had done in the earlier 
days of Willoughby’s courtship. She kissed them warmly, 
ashamed of kissing, though the warmth was real. 

They retired with a flow of excuses to Dr. Middleton for 
disturbing him. He stood at the door to bow them out, and 
holding the door for Clara to wind up the procession, dis¬ 
covered her at a far corner of the room. 

He was debating upon the advisability of leaving her 
there, when Vernon Whitford crossed the hall from the 
laboratory door, a mirror of himself in his companion air of 
discomposure. 

That was not important, so long as Vernon was a check 
on Clara; but the moment Clara, thus baffled, moved to 
quit the library, Dr. Middleton felt the horror of having an 
uncomfortable face opposite. 

“No botheration, I hope ? It’s the worst thing possible 
to work on. Where have you been ? I suspect your weak 
point is not to arm yourself in triple brass against bother 
and worry; and no good work can you do unless you do. 
You have come out of that laboratory.” 

“ I have, sir. — Can I get you any book ? 99 Vernon said to 
Clara. 

She thanked him, promising to depart immediately. 

“ Now you are at the section of Italian literature, my 
love,” said Dr. Middleton. “Well, Mr. Whitford, the labo¬ 
ratory — ah ! — where the amount of labour done within the 
space of a year would not stretch an electric current between 
this Hall and the railway station : say, four miles, which I 
presume the distance to be. Well, sir, a dilettantism costly 
in time and machinery is as ornamental as foxes’ tails and 
deers’ horns to an independent gentleman whose fellows are 
contented with the latter decorations for their civic wreath. 
Willoughby, let me remark, has recently shown himself 
most considerate for my girl. As far as I could gather— T 
have been listening to a dialogue of ladies — he is as gener 


246 


THE EGOIST 


ous as lie is discreet. There are certain combats in which 
to be the one to succumb is to claim the honours; — and 
that is what women will not learn. I doubt their seeing the 
glory of it.” 

“ I have heard of it; I have been with Willoughby,” 
Vernon said hastily, to shield Clara from her father’s 
allusive attacks. He wished to convey to her that his 
interview with Willoughby had not been profitable in her 
interests, and that she had better at once, having him 
present to support her, pour out her whole heart to her 
father. But how was it to be conveyed ? She would not 
meet his eyes, and he was too poor an intriguer to be ready 
on the instant to deal out the verbal obscurities which are 
transparencies to one. 

“ I shall regret it, if Willoughby has annoyed you, for he 
stands high in my favour,” said Dr. Middleton. 

Clara dropped a book. Her father started higher than 
the nervous impulse warranted in his chair. Vernon tried 
to win a glance, and she was conscious of his effort, but her 
angry and guilty feelings prompting her resolution to follow 
her own counsel, kept her eyelids on the defensive. 

“ I don’t say he annoys me, sir. I am here to give him 
my advice, and if he does not accept it I have no right to be 
annoyed. W illoughby seems annoyed that Colonel De Craye 
should talk of going to-morrow or next day.” 

“He likes his friends about him. Upon my word, a man 
of a more genial heart you might march a day without find¬ 
ing. But you have it on the forehead, Mr. Whitford.” 

“ Oh! no, sir.” 

“ There,” Dr. Middleton drew his finger along his brows. 

Vernon felt along his own, and coined an excuse for their 
blackness; unaware that the direction of his mind toward 
Clara pushed him to a kind of clumsy double meaning, 
while he satisfied an. inward and craving wrath, as he said: 
“ By the way, I have been racking my head ; I must apply 
to you, sir. I have a line, and I am uncertain of the run of 
the line. Will this pass, do you think ?— 

‘ In Asination’s tongue he asinates: * 

signifying, that he excels any man of us at donkey-dialect.” 

After a decent interval for the genius of criticism to seem 


THE FLIGHT IN WILD WEATHER 


247 


to have been sitting under his frown, Dr. Middleton rejoined 
with sober jocularity: “No, sir, it will not pass, and your 
uncertainty in regard to the run of the line would only be 
extended were the line centipedal. Our recommendation is, 
that you erase it before the arrival of the ferule. This 
might do: — 

* In Assignation’s name he assignats: * 

signifying, that he pre-eminently flourishes hypothetical 
promises to pay by appointment. That might pass. But 
you will forbear to cite me for your authority.” 

“ The line would be acceptable if I could get it to apply,” 
said Vernon. 

“Or this ...” Dr. Middleton was offering a second 
suggestion, but Clara fled, astonished at men as she never 
yet had been. Why, in a burning world they would be 
exercising their minds in absurdities ! And those two were 
scholars, learned men ! And both knew they were in the 
presence of a soul in a tragic fever! 

A minute after she had closed the door they were deep in 
their work. Dr. Middleton forgot his alternative line. 

“ Nothing serious ? ” he said in reproof of the want of 
honourable clearness on Vernon’s brows. 

“ I trust not, sir : it’s a case for common sense.” 

“ And you call that not serious ? ” 

“ I take Hermann’s praise of the versus dochmiachus to 
be not only serious but unexaggerated,” said Vernon. 

Dr. Middleton assented and entered on the voiceful 
ground of Greek metres, shoving your dry dusty world from 
his elbows. 


CHAPTER XXV 

THE FLIGHT IN WILD WEATHER 

The morning of Lucy Darleton’s letter of reply to her 
friend Clara was fair before sunrise with luminous colours 
that are an omen to the husbandman. Clara had no 
weather-eye for the rich Eastern crimson, nor a quiet space 
within her for the beauty. She looked on it as her gate of 



248 


THE EGOIST 


promise, and it set her throbbing with a revived relief in 
radiant things which she once dreamed of to surround her 
life, but her accelerated pulses narrowed her thoughts upon 
the machinery of her project. She herself was metal, point¬ 
ing all to her one aim when in motion. Nothing came amiss 
to it, everything was fuel; fibs, evasions, the serene battal¬ 
ions of white lies parallel on the march with dainty rogue 
falsehoods. She had delivered herself of many yesterday 
in her engagements for to-day. Pressure was put on her to 
engage herself, and she did so liberally, throwing the bur¬ 
den of deceitfulness on the extraordinary pressure. “ I want 
the early part of the morning; the rest of the day I shall be 
at liberty.” She said it to Willoughby, Miss Dale, Colonel De 
Craye, and only the third time was she aware of the delicious 
double meaning. Hence she associated it with the colonel. 

Your loudest outcry against the wretch who breaks your 
rules, is in asking how a tolerably conscientious person 
could have done this and the other besides the main offence, 
which you vow you could overlook but for the minor objec¬ 
tions pertaining to conscience, the incomprehensible and 
abominable lies, for example, or the brazen coolness of the 
lying. Yet you know that we live in an undisciplined 
world, where in our seasons of activity we are servants of 
our design, and that this comes of our passions, and those 
of our position. Our design shapes us for the work in 
hand, the passions man the ship, the position is their apol¬ 
ogy : and now should conscience be a passenger on board, a 
merely seeming swiftness of our vessel will keep him dumb 
as the unwilling guest of a pirate captain scudding from the 
cruiser half in cloven brine through rocks and shoals to 
save his black flag. Beware the false position. 

That is easy to say : sometimes the tangle descends on us 
like a net of blight on a rose-bush. There is then an instant 
choice for us between courage to cut loose, and desperation 
if we do not. But not many men are trained to courage; 
young women are trained to cowardice. For them to front 
an evil with plain speech is to be guilty of effrontery and 
forfeit the waxen polish of purity, and therewith their com¬ 
manding place in the market. They are trained to please 
man’s taste, for which purpose they soon learn to live out of 
themselves, and look on themselves as he looks, almost as 


THE FLIGHT IN WILD WEATHER 


249 


little disturbed as he by the undiscovered. Without cour¬ 
age, conscience is a sorry guest; and if all goes well with 
the pirate captain, conscience will be made to walk the 
plank for being of no service to either party. 

Clara’s fibs and evasions disturbed her not in the least 
that morning. She had chosen desperation, and she thought 
herself very brave because she was just brave enough to fly 
from her abhorrence. She was light-hearted, or more truly 
drunken-hearted. Her quick nature realized the out of 
prison as vividly and suddenly as it had sunk sudden]/ 
and leadenly under the sense of imprisonment. Vernon 
crossed her mind : that was a friend ! Yes, and there *as 
a guide; but he would disapprove, and even he thwarting 
her way to sacred liberty must be thrust aside. 

What would he think ? They might never meet, for her 
to know. Or one day in the Alps they might meet, a middle- 
aged couple, he famous, she regretful only to have fallen 
below his lofty standard. “ For, Mr. Whitford,” says she, 
very earnestly, “ I did wish at that time, believe me or not, 
to merit your approbation.” The brows of the phantom 
Yernon whom she conjured up were stern, as she had seen 
them yesterday in the library. 

She gave herself a chiding for thinking of him when her 
mind should be intent on that which he was opposed to. 

It was a livelier relaxation to think of young Cross jay’s 
shamefaced confession presently, that he had been a lag¬ 
gard in bed while she swept the dews. She laughed at him, 
and immediately Cross jay popped out on her from behind a 
tree, causing her to clap hand to heart and stand fast. A 
conspirator is not of the stuff to bear surprises. He feared 
he had hurt her and was manly in his efforts to soothe*: he 
had been up “ hours,” he said, and had watched her coming 
along the avenue, and did not mean to startle her: it was 
the kind of fun he played with fellows, and if he had hurt 
her, she might do anything to him she liked, and she would 
see if he could not stand to be punished. He was urgent 
with her to inflict corporal punishment on him. 

“ I shall leave it to the boatswain to do that when you ’re 
in the navy,” said Clara. 

“ The boatswain dare n’t strike an officer ! so now you see 
what you know of the navy,” said Crossjay. 


250 


THE EGOIST 


“But you could not have been out before me, you 
naughty boy, for I found all the locks and bolts when I 
went to the door.” 

“ But you did n’t go to the back-door, and Sir Wil¬ 
loughby’s private door: you came out by the hall-door; 
and I know what you want, Miss Middleton, you want not 
to pay what you’ve lost.” 

“ What have I lost, Crossjay ? ” 

“ Your wager.” 

“ What was that ? ” 

“ You know.” 

“ Speak.” 

“ A kiss.” 

“ Nothing of the sort. But, dear boy, I don’t love you 
less for not kissing you. All that is nonsense: you have to 
think only of learning, and to be truthful. Never tell a 
story : suffer anything rather than be dishonest.” She was 
particularly impressive upon the silliness and wickedness 
of falsehood, and added : “ Do you hear ? ” 

“Yes: but you kissed me when I had been out in the 
rain that day.” 

“ Because I promised.” 

“ And, Miss Middleton, you betted a kiss yesterday.” 

“ I am sure, Crossjay — no, I will not say I am sure: 
but can you say you are sure you were out first this morn¬ 
ing ? Well, will you say you are sure that when you left 
the house you did not see me in the aveuue ? You can’t: 
ah! ” 

“ Miss Middleton, I do really believe I was dressed first.” 

“ Always be truthful, my dear boy, and then you may 
feel that Clara Middleton will always love you.” 

“But, Miss Middleton, when you ’re married you won’t be 
Clara Middleton.” 

“ I certainly shall, Cross jay.” 

“ No, you won’t, because I’m so fond of your name ! ” 

She considered and said: “ You have warned me, Cross¬ 
jay, and I shall not marry. T shall wait,” sbe was going to 
say, “ for you,” but turned the hesitation to a period. “ Is 
the village where I posted my letter the day before yester¬ 
day too far for you ? ” 

Crossjay howled in contempt. “Next to Clara my fa¬ 
vourite ’s Lucy,” he said 


THE FLIGHT IN WILD WEATHER 


251 


“I thought Clara came next to Nelson,” said she; “and a 
long way off too, if you ’re not going to be a landlubber.” 

“ I’m not going to be a landlubber, Miss Middleton, you 
may be absolutely positive on your solemn word.” 

“ You ’re getting to talk like one a little now and then. 
Crossjay.” 

“ Then I won’t talk at all.” 

He stuck to his resolution for one whole minute. 

Clara hoped that on this morning of a doubtful though 
imperative venture she had done some good. 

They walked fast to cover the distance to the village post- 
office and back before the breakfast hour: and they had 
plenty of time, arriving too early for the opening of the 
door, so that Cross jay began to dance with an appetite, and 
was despatched to besiege a bakery. Clara felt lonely with¬ 
out him, apprehensively timid in the shuttered unmoving 
village street. She was glad of his return. When at last 
her letter was handed to her, on the testimony of the post¬ 
man that she was the lawful applicant, Cross jay and she 
put on a sharp trot to be back at the Hall in good time. 
She took a swallowing glance of the first page of Lucy’s 
writing, — 

“ Telegraph, and I will meet you. I will supply you with 
everything you can want for the two nights, if you cannot 
stop longer.” 

That was the gist of the letter. A second, less voracious 
glance at it along the road brought sweetness: — Lucy 
wrote, — 

“ Do I love you as I did ? my best friend, you must fall 
into unhappiness to have the answer to that.” 

Clara broke a silence. 

“Yes, dear Crossjay, and if you like you shall have 
another walk with me after breakfast. But remember, you 
must not say where you have gone with me. I shall give 
you twenty shillings to go and buy those bird’s eggs and the 
butterflies you want for your collection; and mind, promise 
me, to-day is your last day of truancy. Tell Mr. Whitford 
how ungrateful you know you have been, that he may have 
some hope of you. You know the way across the fields to 
the railway station ? ” 

“ You save a mile; you drop on the road by Combline’s 


252 


THE EGOIST 


mill, and then there’s another five-minutes’ cut, and the 
rest’s road.” 

“ Then, Crossjay, immediately after breakfast run round 
behind the pheasantry, and there I ’ll find you. And if any 
one comes to you before I come, say you are admiring the 
plumage of the Himalaya — the beautiful Indian bird; and 
if we ’re found together, we run a race, and of course you 
can catch me, but you must n’t until we ’re out of sight. 
Tell Mr. Vernon at night — tell Mr. Whitford at night you 
had the money from me as part of my allowance to you for 
pocket-money. I used to like to have pocket-money, Cross- 
jay. And you may tell him I gave you the holiday, and I 
may write to him for his excuse, if he is not too harsh to 
grant it. He can be very harsh.” 

“You look right into his eyes next time, Miss Middleton. 
I used to think him awful, till he made me look at him. 
He says men ought to look straight at one another, just as 
we do when he gives me my boxing-lesson, and then we won’t 
have quarrelling half so much. I can’t recollect everything 
he says.” 

“You are not bound to, Crossjay.” 

“ Ho, but you like to hear.” 

“ Really, dear boy, I can’t accuse myself of having told 
you that.” 

“Ho, but, Miss Middleton, you do. And he’s fond of 
your singing and playing on the piano, and watches 
you.” 

“We shall be late if we don’t mind,” said Clara, starting 
to a pace close on a run. 

They were in time for a circuit in the park to the wild 
double cherry-blossom, no longer all white. Clara gazed 
up from under it, where she had imagined a fairer visible 
heavenliness than any other sight of earth had ever given 
her. That was when Vernon lay beneath. But she had 
certainly looked above, not at him. The tree seemed sor¬ 
rowful in its withering flowers of the colour of trodden 
snow. 

Crossjay resumed the conversation. 

“ He says ladies don’t like him much.” 

M Who says that ? ” 

“ Mr. Whitford.” 


THE FLIGHT IN WILD WEATHER 


253 


“ Were those his words ? ” 

“ I forget the words : but he said they would n’t be taught 
by him, like me ever since you came; and since you came 
I’ve liked him ten times more.” 

“The more you like him the more I shall like you, 
Crossjay.” 

The boy raised a shout and scampered away to Sir 
Willoughby, at the appearance of whom Clara felt herself 
nipped and curling inward. Crossjay ran up to him with 
every sign of pleasure. Yet he had not mentioned him 
during the walk; and Clara took it for a sign that the boy 
understood the entire satisfaction Willoughby had in mere 
shows of affection, and acted up to it. Hardly blaming 
Cross jay, she was a critic of the scene, for the reason that 
youthful creatures who have ceased to love a person, hunger 
for evidence against him to confirm their hard animus, which 
will seem to them sometimes, when he is not immediately 
irritating them, brutish, because they cannot analyze it and 
reduce it to the multitude of just antagonisms whereof it 
came. It has passed by large accumulation into a sombre 
and speechless load upon the senses, and fresh evidence, the 
smallest item, is a champion to speak for it. Being about to 
do wrong, she grasped at this eagerly, and brooded on the 
little of vital and truthful that there was in the man, and 
how he corrupted the boy. Nevertheless she instinctively 
imitated Crossjay in an almost sparkling salute to him. 

“ Good morning, Willoughby; it was not a morning to 
lose : have you been out long ? ” 

He retained her hand. “ My dear Clara! and you, have 
you not over-fatigued yourself ? Where have you been ? ” 

“ Round — everywhere! And I am certainly not tired.” 

“ Only you and Crossjay ? You should have loosened 
the dogs.” 

“ Their barking would have annoyed the house.” 

“Les3 than I am annoyed to think of you without 
protection.” 

He kissed her fingers : it was a loving speech. 

“The household . . .” said Clara, but would not insist 
to convict him of what he could not have perceived. 

“ If you outstrip me another morning, Clara, promise me 
f o take the dogs j will you ? ” 


254 


THE EGOIST 


“Yes.” 

“ To-day I am altogether yours.” 

“Are you?” 

“ From the first to the last hour of it! — So you fall in 
with Horace’s humour pleasantly ? ” 

“ He is very amusing.” 

“ As good as though one had hired him.” 

“ Here comes Colonel He Craye.” 

“ He must think we have hired him! ” 

She noticed the bitterness of Willoughby’s tone. He 
sang out a good morning to He Craye, and remarked that 
he must go to the stables. 

“Darleton? Harleton, Miss Middleton?” said the colo¬ 
nel, rising from his bow to her: “ a daughter of General 
Harleton ? If so, I have had the honour to dance with her. 
And have not you ? — practised with her, I mean; or gone 
off in a triumph to dance it out as young ladies do ? So 
you know what a delightful partner she is.” 

“ She is ! ” cried Clara, enthusiastic for her succouring 
friend, whose letter was the treasure in her bosom. 

“Oddly, the name did not strike me yesterday, Miss 
Middleton. In the middle of the night it rang a little 
silver bell in my ear, and I remembered the lady I was 
half in love with, if only for her dancing. She is dark, 
of your height, as light on her feet; a sister in another 
colour. Now that I know her to be your friend ! . . .” 

“Why, you may meet her, Colonel He Craye.” 

“ It ’ll be to offer her a castaway. And one only meets a 
charming girl to hear that she’s engaged ! ’T is not a line 
of a ballad, Miss Middleton, but out of the heart.” 

“Lucy Harleton . . . You were leading me to talk 
seriously to you, Colonel He Craye.” 

“Will you one day? — and not think me a perpetual 
tumbler! You have heard of melancholy clowns. You 
would find the face not so laughable behind my paint. 
When I was thirteen years younger I was loved, and my 
dearest sank to the grave. Since then I have not been 
quite at home in life; probably because of finding no one 
so charitable as she. ’T is easy to win smiles and hands, 
but not so easy to win a woman whose faith you would trust 
as your own heart before the enemy. I was poor then. 


THE FLIGHT IN WILD WEATHER 


255 


She said: ‘ The day after my twenty-first birthday ; y and 
that day I went for her, and I wondered they did not refuse 
me at the door. I was shown upstairs, and I saw her, 
and saw death. She wished to marry me, to leave me her 
fortune! ” 

“ Then never marry,” said Clara in an underbreath. 

She glanced behind. 

Sir Willoughby was close, walking on turf. 

“ I must be cunning to escape him after breakfast,” she 
thought. 

He had discarded his foolishness of the previous days, 
and the thought in him could have replied: “lama dolt if 
I let you out of my sight.” 

Vernon appeared, formal as usual of late. Clara begged 
his excuse for withdrawing Cross jay from his morning 
swim. He nodded. 

De Craye called to Willoughby for a book of the trains. 

“ There’s a card in the smoking-room ; eleven, one, and 
four are the hours, if you must go,” said Willoughby. 

“ You leave the Hall, Colonel De Craye ? ” 

"In two or three days, Miss Middleton.” 

She did not request him to stay : his announcement pro¬ 
duced no effect on her. Consequently, thought he — well, 
what ? nothing : well, then, that she might not be minded 
to stay herself. Otherwise she would have regretted the 
loss of an amusing companion: that is the modest way of 
putting it. There is a modest and a vain for the same sen¬ 
timent ; and both may be simultaneously in the same breast; 
and each one as honest as the other; so shy is man’s vanity 
in the presence of here and there a lady. She liked him : 
she did not care a pin for him — how could she ? yet she 
liked him : O to be able to do her some kindling bit of ser¬ 
vice ! These were his consecutive fancies, resolving naturally 
to the exclamation, and built on the conviction that she did 
not love Willoughby, and waited for a spirited lift from cir¬ 
cumstances. His call for a book of the trains had been a 
sheer piece of impromptu, in the mind as well as on the 
mouth. It sprang, unknown to him, of conjectures he had 
indulged yesterday and the day before. This morning she 
would have an answer to her letter to her friend, Miss 
Lucy Darleton, the pretty dark girl, whom De Craye was 


256 


THE EGOIST 


astonished not to have noticed more when he danced with 
her. She, pretty as she was, had come to his recollection 
through the name and rank of her father, a famous general 
of cavalry, and tactician in that arm. The colonel despised 
himself for not having been devoted to Clara Middleton's 
friend. 

The morning's letters were on the bronze plate in the 
hall. Clara passed on her way to her room without inspect¬ 
ing them. He Craye opened an envelope and went upstairs 
to scribble a line. Sir Willoughby observed their absence 
at the solemn reading to the domestic servants in advance of 
breakfast. Three chairs were unoccupied. Vernon had his 
own notions of a mechanical service — and a precious profit 
he derived from them! but the other two seats returned the 
stare Willoughby cast at their backs with an impudence 
that reminded him of his friend Horace’s calling for a book 
of the trains, when a minute afterward he admitted he was 
going to stay at the Hall another two days, or three. The 
man possessed by jealousy is never in need of matter for it: 
he magnifies ; grass is jungle, hillocks are mountains. Wil¬ 
loughby's legs crossing and uncrossing audibly, and his 
tight-folded arms and clearing of the throat, were faint 
indications of his condition. 

“ Are you in fair health this morning, Willoughby ? " Hr. 
Middleton said to him after he had closed his volumes. 

“ The thing is not much questioned by those who know 
me intimately,” he replied. 

“ Willoughby unwell! ” and “ He is health incarnate! ” 
exclaimed the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. 

Laetitia grieved for him. Sunrays on a pest-stricken city, 
she thought, were like the smile of his face. She believed 
that he deeply loved Clara and had learnt more of her 
alienation. 

He went into the hall to look up the well for the pair of 
malefactors; on fire with what he could not reveal to a soul. 

He Craye was in the housekeeper's room, talking to young 
Cross jay and Mrs. Montague just come up to breakfast. 
He had heard the boy chattering, and as the door was ajar, 
he peeped in, and was invited to enter. Mrs. Montague 
was very fond of hearing him talk ; he paid her the familiar 
respect which a lady of fallen fortunes, at a certain period 


THE FLIGHT IN WILD WEATHER 


257 


after the fall, enjoys as a befittingly sad souvenir, and the 
respectfulness of the lord of the house was more chilling. 

She bewailed the boy’s trying his constitution with long 
walks before he had anything in him to walk on. 

“ And where did you go this morning, my lad ? ” said De 
Craye. 

“ Ah, you know the ground, colonel,” said Cross jay. “ I 
am hungry! I shall eat three eggs and some bacon, and 
buttered cakes, and jam, then begin again, on my second 
cup of coffee.” 

“It’s not braggadocio,” remarked Mrs. Montague. “He 
waits empty from five in the morning till nine, and then he 
comes famished to my table, and eats too much.” 

“ Oh! Mrs. Montague, that is what the country people 
call roemancing. For, Colonel De Craye, I had a bun at 
seven o’clock. Miss Middleton forced me to go and buy it.” 

“ A stale bun, my boy ? ” 

“Yesterday’s : there was n’t much of a stopper to you in 
it, like a new bun.” 

“And where did you leave Miss Middleton when you 
went to buy the bun ? You should never leave a lady; and 
the street of a country town is lonely at that early hour. 
Crossjay, you surprise me.” 

“ She forced me to go, colonel. Indeed she did. What 
do I care for a bun! And she was quite safe. We could 
hear the people stirring in the post-office, and I met our 
postman going for his letter-bag. I did n’t want to go: 
bother the bun! — but you can’t disobey Miss Middleton. 
I never want to, and wouldn’t.” 

“ There we ’re of the same mind,” said the colonel, and 
Cross jay shouted, for the lady whom they exalted was at 
the door. 

“ You will be too tired for a ride this morning,” De Craye 
said to her, descending the stairs. 

She swung a bonnet by the ribands : “ I don’t think of 
riding to-day.” 

“ Why did you not depute your mission to me ? ” 

“ I like to bear my own burdens, as far as I can.” 

“ Miss Darleton is well ? ” 

“I presume so.” 

“ Will you try Jber recollection of me ? ” 


258 


THE EGOIST 


"It will probably be quite as lively as yours was.” 

"Shall you see her soon ? ” 

“ I hope so.’’ 

Sir Willoughby met her at the foot of the stairs, but 
refrained from giving her a hand that shook 

" We shall have the day together,” he said. 

Clara bowed. 

At the breakfast-table she faced a clock. 

De Craye took out his watch. "You are five and a half 
minutes too slow by that clock, Willoughby.” 

" The man omitted to come from Eendon to set it last 
week, Horace. He will find the hour too late here for him 
when he does come.” 

One of the ladies compared the time of her watch with 
De Craye’s, and Clara looked at hers and gratefully noted 
that she was four minutes in arrear. 

She left the breakfast-room at a quarter to ten, after kiss¬ 
ing her father. Willoughby was behind her. He had been 
soothed by thinking of his personal advantages over De 
Craye, and he felt assured that if he could be solitary with 
his eccentric bride and fold her in himself, he would, cutting 
temper adrift, be the man he had been to her not so many 
days back. Considering how few days back, his temper was 
roused, but he controlled it. 

They were slightly dissenting, as De Craye stepped into 
■,he hall. 

" A present worth examining,” Willoughby said to her : 
" and I do not dwell on the costliness. Come presently, then. 
I am at your disposal all day. I will drive you in the after¬ 
noon to call on Lady Busshe to offer your thanks : but you 
must see it first. It is laid out in the laboratory.” 

"There is time before the afternoon,” said Clara. 

" Wedding presents ? ” interposed De Craye. 

" A porcelain service from Lady Busshe, Horace.” 

"Not in fragments? Let me have a look at it. I’m 
haunted by an idea that porcelain always goes to pieces. 
I ’ll have a look and take a hint. We ’re in the laboratory, 
Miss Middleton.” 

He put his arm under Willoughby’s. The resistance to 
him was momentary : Willoughby had the satisfaction of the 
thought that De Craye being with him was not with Clara; 


THE FLIGHT IN WILD WEATHER 259 

and seeing her giving orders to her maid Barclay, he deferred 
his claim on her company for some short period. 

De Craye detained him in the laboratory, first over the 
China cups and saucers, and then with the latest of London 
— tales of youngest Cupid upon subterranean adventures, 
having high titles to light him. Willoughby liked the tale 
thus illuminated, for without the title there was no special 
savour in such affairs, and it pulled down his betters in rank. 
He was of a morality to reprobate the erring dame while he 
enjoyed the incidents. He could not help interrupting De 
Craye to point at Vernon through the window, striding this 
way and that, evidently on the hunt for young Cross jay. 
“ No one here knows how to manage the boy except myself. 
But go on, Horace/’ he said, checking his contemptuous 
laugh; and Vernon did look ridiculous, out there half- 
drenched already in a white rain, again shuffled off by the 
little rascal. It seemed that he was determined to have 
his runaway: he struck up the avenue at full pedestrian 
racing pace. 

“ A man looks a fool cutting after a cricket-ball; but 
putting on steam in a storm of rain to catch a young villain 
out of sight, beats anything I’ve witnessed,” Willoughby 
resumed, in his amusement. 

“ Aiha! ” said De Craye, waving a hand to accompany 
the melodious accent, “ there are things to beat that ion 
fun.” 

He had smoked in the laboratory, so Willoughby directed 
a servant to transfer the porcelain service to one of th* 
sitting-rooms for Clara’s inspection of it. 

“You’re a bold man,” De Craye remarked. “'The luck 
may be with you, though. I would n’t handle the fragile 
treasure for a trifle.” 

“ I believe in my luck,” said Willoughby. 

Clara was now sought for. The lord of the house desired 
her presence impatiently, and had to wait. She was in none 
of the lower rooms. Barclay, her maid, upon interrogation, 
declared she was in none of the upper. Willoughby turned 
sharp on De Craye : he was there. 

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel, and Miss Dale, were con¬ 
sulted. They had nothing to say about Clara’s movements, 
more than that they could not understand her exceeding 


260 


THE EGOIST 


restlessness. The idea of her being out of doors grew serious; 
heaven was black, hard thunder rolled, and lightning flushed 
the battering rain. Men bearing umbrellas, shawls, and 
cloaks were despatched on a circuit of the park. De Craye 
said : “ I’ll be one.” 

“ No,” cried Willoughby, starting to intercept him, “ I 
can’t allow it.” 

“ I ’ve the scent of a hound, Willoughby; I ’ll soon be on 
the track.” 

“ My dear Horace, I won’t let you go.” 

“ Adieu, dear boy! and if the lady’s discoverable, I’m the 
one to find her.” 

He stepped to the umbrella-stand. There was then a 
general question whether Clara had taken her umbrella. 
Barclay said she had. The fact indicated a wider stroll 
than round inside the park : Cross jay was likewise absent. 
De Craye nodded to himself. 

Willoughby struck a rattling blow on the barometer. 

“ Where’s Pollington ? ” he called, and sent word for his 
man Pollington to bring big fishing-boots and waterproof 
wrappers. 

An urgent debate within him was in progress. 

Should he go forth alone on his chance of discovering 
Clara and forgiving her under his umbrella and cloak ? or 
should he prevent De Craye from going forth alone on the 
chance he vaunted so impudently ? 

“ You will offend me, Horace, if you insist,” he said. 

“Begard me as an instrument of destiny, Willoughby,” 
replied De Craye. 

“ Then we go in company.” 

“ But that’s an addition of one that cancels the other by 
conjunction, and’s worse than simple division: for I can’t 
trust my wits unless I rely on them alone, you see.” 

“ Upon my word, you talk at times most unintelligible 
stuff, to be frank with you, Horace. Give it in English.” 

“ ’T is not suited perhaps to the genius of the language, 
for I thought I talked English.” 

“ Oh! there’s English gibberish as well as Irish, we 
know ! ” 

“And a deal foolisher when they do go at it; for it won’t 
bear squeezing, we think, like Irish.” 


THE FLIGHT IN WILD WEATHER 


261 


“ Where ! ” exclaimed the ladies, “ where can she be! 
The storm is terrible.” 

Laetitia suggested the boathouse. 

“For Cross jay hadn’t a swim this morning!” said De 
Craye. 

No one reflected on the absurdity that Clara should think 
of taking Crossjay for a swim in the lake, and immediately 
after his breakfast: it was accepted as a suggestion at 
least that she and Cross jay had gone to the lake for a 
row. 

In the hopefulness of the idea, Willoughby suffered De 
Craye to go on his chance unaccompanied. He was near 
chuckling. He projected a plan for dismissing Cross jay and 
remaining in the boathouse with Clara, luxuriating in the 
prestige which would attach to him for seeking and find¬ 
ing her. Deadly sentiments intervened. Still he might 
expect to be alone with her where she could not slip from 
him. 

The throwing open of the hall-doors for the gentlemen 
presented a framed picture of a deluge. All the young¬ 
leaved trees were steely black, without a gradation of green, 
drooping and pouring, and the song of rain had become an 
inveterate hiss. 

The ladies beholding it exclaimed against Clara, even 
apostrophized her, so dark are trivial errors when circum¬ 
stances frown. She must be mad to tempt such weather: 
she was very giddyj she was never at rest. Clara! Clara! 
how could you be so wild ! Ought we not to tell Dr. 
Middleton ? 

Laetitia induced them to spare him. 

“ Which way do you take ? ” said Willoughby, rather 
fearful that his companion was not to be got rid of now. 

“ Any way,” said De Craye. “ I chuck up my head like 
a halfpenny and go by the toss.” 

This enraging nonsense drove off Willoughby. De Craye 
saw him cast a furtive eye at his heels to make sure he was 
not followed, and thought: “ Jove ! he may be fond of her. 
But he’s not on the track. She’s a determined girl, if I’m 
correct. She’s a girl of a hundred thousand. Girls like 
that make the right sort of wives for the right men. They ’re 
the girls to make men think of marrying. To-morrow! 


262 


THE EGOIST 


only give me the chance. They stick to you fast when 
they do stick. ” 

Then a thought of her flower-like drapery and face caused 
him fervently to hope she had escaped the storm. 

Calling at the West park-lodge he heard that Miss Mid¬ 
dleton had been seen passing through the gate with Master 
Cross jay; but she had not been seen coming back. Mr. 
Vernon Whitford had passed through half an hour later. 

“ After his young man ! ” said the colonel. 

The lodge-keeper’s wife and daughter knew of Master 
Crossjay’s pranks ; Mr. Whitford, they said, had made in¬ 
quiries about him, and must have caught him and sent him 
home to change his dripping things ; for Master Cross jay 
had come back, and had declined shelter in the lodge; he 
seemed to be crying ; he went away soaking over the wet 
grass, hanging his head. The opinion at the lodge was, 
that Master Crossjay was unhappy. 

“ He very properly received a wigging from Mr. Whit¬ 
ford, I have no doubt,” said Colonel De Craye. 

Mother and daughter supposed it to be the case, and 
considered Crossjay very wilful for not going straight home 
to the Hall to change his wet clothes; he was drenched. 

De Craye drew out his watch. The time was ten minutes 
past eleven. If the surmise he had distantly spied was 
correct, Miss Middleton would have been caught in the 
storm midway to her destination. By his guess at her 
character (knowledge of it, he would have said), he judged 
that no storm would daunt her on a predetermined expe¬ 
dition. He deduced in consequence that she was at the 
present moment flying to her friend the charming brunette 
Lucy Darleton. 

Still, as there was a possibility of the rain having been 
too much for her, and as he had no other speculation con¬ 
cerning the route she had taken, he decided upon keeping 
ilong the road to Rendon, with a keen eye at cottage and 
farmhouse windows. 


VERNON IN PURSUri 


263 


CHAPTER XXVI 

VERNON IN PURSUIT 

The lodge-keeper had a son, who was a chum of Master 
Crossjay’s, and errant-fellow with him upon many adven¬ 
tures ; for this boy’s passion was to become a gamekeeper, 
and accompanied by one of the head-gamekeeper’s young¬ 
sters, he and Crossjay, were in the habit of rangeing over the 
country, preparing for a profession delightful to the tastes 
of all three. Cross jay’s prospective connection with the 
mysterious ocean bestowed the title of captain on him by 
common consent; he led them, and when missing for lessons 
he was generally in the society of Jacob Croom or Jonathan 
Fernaway. Vernon made sure of Crossjay when he per¬ 
ceived Jacob Croom sitting on a stool in the little lodge- 
parlour. Jacob’s appearance of a diligent perusal of a book 
he had presented to the lad, he took for a decent piece of 
trickery. It was with amazement that he heard from the 
mother and daughter, as well as Jacob, of Miss Middleton’s 
going through the gate before ten o’clock with Crossjay 
beside her, the latter too hurried to spare a nod to Jacob. 
That she, of all on earth, should be encouraging Cross jay 
to truancy was incredible. Vernon had to fall back upon 
Greek and Latin aphoristic shots at the sex to believe it. 

Rain was universal; a thick robe of it swept from hill to 
hill; thunder rumbled remote, and between the ruffled roars 
the downpour pressed on the land with a great noise of eager 
gobbling, much like that of the swine’s trough fresh filled, 
as though a vast assembly of the hungered had seated them¬ 
selves clamorously and fallen to on meats and drinks in a 
silence, save of the chaps. A rapid walker poetically and 
humourously minded gathers multitudes of images on his 
way. And rain, the heaviest you can meet, is a lively com¬ 
panion when the resolute pacer scorns discomfort of wet 
clothes and squealing boots. South-western rain-clouds, too, 
are never long sullen: they enfold and will have the earth in 
a good strong glut of the kissing overflow; then, as a hawk 
with feathers on his beak of the bird in his claw lifts head, 


264 


THE EGOIST 


they rise and take veiled feature in long climbing watery 
lines: at any moment they may break the veil and show 
soft upper cloud, show sun on it, show sky, green near the 
verge they spring from, of the green of grass in early dew; 
or, along a travelling sweep that rolls asunder overhead, 
heaven’s laughter of purest blue among titanic white shoul¬ 
ders : it may mean fair smiling for awhile, or be the lightest 
interlude; but the watery lines, and the drifting, the chas¬ 
ing, the upsoaring, all in a shadowy fingering of form, and 
the animation of the leaves of the trees pointing them 
on, the bending of the tree-tops, the snapping of branches, 
and the hurrahings of the stubborn hedge at wrestle with the 
flaws, yielding but a leaf at most, and that on a fling, make 
a glory of contest and wildness without aid of colour to 
inflame the man who is at home in them from old associa¬ 
tion on road, heath and mountain. Let him be drenched, 
his heart will sing. And thou, trim cockney, that jeerest, 
consider thyself, to whom it may occur to be out in such a 
scene, and with what steps of a nervous dancing master it 
would be thine to play the hunted rat of the elements, for 
the preservation of the one imagined dry spot about thee, 
somewhere on thy luckless person! The taking of rain 
and sun alike befits men of our climate, and he who would 
have the secret of a strengthening intoxication must court 
the clouds of the South-west with a lover’s blood. 

Vernon’s happy recklessness was dashed by fears for Miss 
Middleton. Apart from those fears, he had the pleasure of 
a gull wheeling among foam-streaks of the wave. He sup¬ 
posed the Swiss and Tyrol Alps to have hidden their heads 
from him for many a day to come, and the springing and 
chiming South-west was the next best thing. A milder 
rain descended; the country expanded darkly defined under¬ 
neath the moving curtain; the clouds were as he liked to 
see them, scaling; but their skirts dragged. Torrents were 
in store, for they coursed streamingly still and had not the 
higher lift, or eagle ascent, whioh he knew for one of the 
signs of fairness, nor had the hills any belt of mist-like 
vapour. 

On a step of the stile leading to the short-cut to Rendon 
young Crossjay was espied. A man-tramp sat on the top 
bar. 


VERNON IN PURSUIT 


265 


"There you are; what are you doing there? Where’s 
Miss Middleton?” said Vernon. “Now, take care before 
you open your mouth.” 

Crossjay shut the mouth he had opened. 

“ The lady has gone away over to a station, sir,” said the 
tramp. 

“You fool! ” roared Crossjay, ready to fly at him. 

“ But ain’t it, now, young gentleman ? Can you say it 
ain’t?” 

“ I gave you a shilling, you ass ! ” 

“ You give me that sum, young gentleman, to stop here 
and take care of you, and here I stopped.” 

“ Mr. Whitford! ” Crossjay appealed to his master, and 
broke off in disgust. “ Take care of me! As if anybody 
who knows me would think I wanted taking care of! 
Why, what a beast you must be, you fellow! ” 

“Just as you like, young gentleman. I chaunted you all 
I know, to keep up your downcast spirits. You did want 
comforting. You wanted it rarely. You cried like an 
infant.” 

“ I let you 1 chaunt ’ as you call it, to keep you from 
swearing.” 

“And why did I swear, young gentleman? because I’ve 
got an itchy coat in the wet, and no shirt for a lining. And 
no breakfast to give me a stomach for this kind of weather. 
That ’s what I’ve come to in this world! I’m a walking 
moral. No wonder I swears, when I don’t strike up a 
chaunt.” 

“But why are you sitting here, wet through, Crossjay? 
Be off home at once, and change, and get ready for me.” 

“Mr. Whitford, I promised, and I tossed this fellow a 
shilling not to go bothering Miss Middleton.” 

“ The lady would n’t have none o’ the young gentleman, 
sir, and I offered to go pioneer for her to the station, behind 
her, at a respectful distance.” 

“ As if! — you treacherous cur! ” Cross jay ground his 
teeth at the betrayer. “Well, Mr. Whitford, and I didn’t 
trust him, and I stuck to him, or he’d have been after her 
whining about his coat and stomach, and talking of his 
being a moral. He repeats that to everybody.” 

“ She has gone to the station ? ” said Vernon. 


266 


THE EGOIST 


Not a word on that subject was to be won from Crossjay* 

“ How long since ? ” Vernon partly addressed Mr. Tramp. 

The latter became seized with shivers as he supplied the 
information that it might be a quarter of an hour or twenty 
minutes. “ But what’s time to me, sir! If I had reg’lar 
meals, I should carry a clock in my inside. I got the rheu¬ 
matics instead.” 

“ Way there !” Vernon cried, and took the stile at a vault. 

“ That’s what gentlemen can do, who sleeps in their beds 
warm,” moaned the tramp. “ They ’ve no joints.” 

Vernon handed him a half-crown piece, for he had been 
of use for once. 

“ Mr. Whitford, let me come. If you tell me to come I 
may. Do let me come,” Cross jay begged with great en¬ 
treaty. “ I sha’n’t see her for . . . ” 

“Be off, quick! ” Vernon cut him short and pushed on. 

The tramp and Crossjay were audible to him ; Crossjay 
spurning the consolations of the professional sad man. 

Vernon sprang across the fields, timing himself by his 
watch to reach Bendon station ten minutes before eleven, 
though without clearly questioning the nature of the resolu¬ 
tion which precipitated him. Dropping to the road, he had 
better foothold than on the slippery field-path, and he ran. 
His principal hope was that Clara would have missed her 
way. Another pelting of rain agitated him on her behalf. 
Might she not as well be suffered to go ? — and sit three 
hours and more in a railway-carriage with wet feet! 

He clasped the visionary little feet to warm them on his 
breast. — But Willoughby’s obstinate fatuity deserved the 
blow ! — But neither she nor her father deserved the scan¬ 
dal. But she was desperate. Could reasoning touch her ? 
If not, what would? He knew of nothing. Yesterday he 
had spoken strongly to Willoughby, to plead with him to 
favour her departure and give her leisure to sound her 
mind, and he had left his cousin, convinced that Clara’s 
best measure was flight: a man so cunning in a pretended 
obtuseness backed by senseless pride, and in petty tricks 
that sprang of a grovelling tyranny, could only be taught 
by facts. 

Her recent treatment of him, however, was very strange ; 
so strange that he might have known himself better if he 


VERNON IN PURSUIT 


267 


had reflected on the bound with which it shot him to a 
hard suspicion. De Craye had prepared the world to hear 
that he was leaving the Hall. Were they in concert ? The 
idea struck at his heart colder than if her damp little feet 
had been there. 

Vernon’s full exoneration of her for making a confidant 
of himself, did not extend its leniency to the young lady’s 
character when there was question of her doing the same 
with a second gentleman. He could suspect much: he 
could even expect to find De Craye at the station. 

That idea drew him up in his run, to meditate on the 
part he should play ; and by drove little Dr. Corney on the 
way to Rendon, and hailed him, and gave his cheerless 
figure the nearest approach to an Irish hug in the form 
of a dry seat under an umbrella and waterproof covering. 

“ Though it is the worst I can do for you, if you decline 
to supplement it with a dose of hot brandy and water at the 
Dolphin,” said he: “ and I ’ll see you take it, if you please. 
I’m bound to ease a Rendon patient out of the world. 
Medicine’s one of their superstitions, which they cling to 
the harder the more useless it gets. Pill and priest launch 
him happy between them. —‘ And what’s on your con¬ 
science, Pat? — It’s whether your blessing, your River- 
ence, would disagree with another drop. — Then, put the 
horse before the cart, my son, and you shall have the two 
in harmony, and God speed ye ! ’ — Rendon station, did you 
say, Vernon ? You shall have my prescription at the Rail¬ 
way Arms, if you’re hurried. You have the look- What 
is it ? Can I help ? ” 

“No. And don’t ask.” 

“ You ’re like the Irish Grenadier who had a bullet in a 
humiliating situation. Here’s Rendon, and through it we 
go with a spanking clatter. Here’s Dr. Corney’s dog-cart 
posthaste again. For there’s no dying without him now, 
and Repentance is on the death-bed for not calling him in 
before ! Half a charge of humbug hurts no son of a gun, 
friend Vernon, if he’d have his firing take effect. Be 
tender to’t in man or woman, particularly woman. So, by 
goes the meteoric doctor, and I ’ll bring noses to window- 
panes, you ’ll see, which reminds me of the sweetest young 
lady I ever saw, and the luckiest man. When is she off for 


268 


THE EGOIST 


her bridal trousseau ? And when are they spliced ? I *X 
not call her perfection, for that’s a post, afraid to move 
But she’s a dancing sprig of the tree next it. Poetry’s 
wanted to speak of her. I ’tn Irish and inflammable, I 
suppose, but I never looked on a girl to make a man com¬ 
prehend the entire holy meaning of the word rapturous, 
like that one. And away she goes ! We ’ll not say another 
word. But you ’re a Grecian, friend Vernon. Now, could n’t 
you think her just a whiff of an idea of a daughter of a 
peccadillo-Goddess ? ” 

“ Deuce take you, Corney, drop me here ; I shall be late 
for the train,” said Vernon, laying hand on the doctor’s arm 
to check him on the way to the station in view. 

Dr. Corney had a Celtic intelligence for a meaning behind 
an illogical tongue. He drew up, observing: “ Two minutes 
run won’t hurt you.” 

He slightly fancied he might have given offence, though 
he was well acquainted with Vernon and had a cordial grasp 
at the parting. 

The truth must be told, that Vernon could not at the 
moment bear any more talk from an Irishman. Dr. Corney 
had succeeded in persuading him not to wonder at Clara 
Middleton’s liking for Colonel De Craye. 


CHAPTER XXVII 

AT THE RAILWAY STATION 

Clara stood in the waiting-room contemplating the white 
rails of the rain-swept line. Her lips parted at the sight of 
Vernon. 

“ You have your ticket ? ” said he. 

She nodded, and breathed more freely; the matter of fact 
question was reassuring. 

“ You are wet,” he resumed; and it could not be denied. 

“A little. I do not feel it.” 

“ I must beg you to come to the inn hard by : half a dozen 
steps. We shall see your train signalled. Come.” 



AT THE RAILWAY STATION 


269 


She thought him startlingly authoritative, but he had 
good sense to back him; and depressed as she was by the 
dampness, she was disposed to yield to reason if he con¬ 
tinued to respect her independence. So she submitted out¬ 
wardly, resisted inwardly, on the watch to stop him from 
taking any decisive lead. 

“ Shall we be sure to see the signal, Mr. Whitford ? ” 

“ I ’ll provide for that.” 

He spoke to the station-clerk, and conducted her across 
the road. 

“ You are quite alone, Miss Middleton ? ” 

“ I am : I have not brought my maid.” 

(< You must take off boots and stockings at once, and have 
them dried. I ’ll put you in the hands of the landlady.” 

“ But my train ! ” 

“ You have full fifteen minutes, besides fair chances of 
delay.” 

He seemed reasonable, the reverse of hostile, in spite of 
his commanding air, and that was not unpleasant in one 
friendly to her adventure. She controlled her alert mis¬ 
trustfulness and passed from him to the landlady, for her 
feet were wet and cold, the skirts of her dress were soiled; 
generally inspecting herself, she was an object to be shud¬ 
dered at, and she was grateful to Vernon for his inattention 
to her appearance. 

Vernon ordered Dr. Corney’s dose, and was ushered up¬ 
stairs to a room of portraits, where the publican’s ancestors 
and family sat against the walls, flat on their canvas as 
weeds of the botanist’s portfolio, although corpulency was 
pretty generally insisted on, and there were formidable 
battalions of bust among the females. All of them had 
the aspect of the national energy which has vanquished 
obstacles to subside on its ideal. They all gazed straight at 
the guest. “ Drink, and come to this ! ” they might have 
been labelled to say to him. He was in the private Wal- 
halla of a large class of his countrymen. The existing 
host had taken forethought to be of the party in his prime, 
and in the central place, looking fresh-flattened there, and 
sanguine from the performance. By-and-by a son would 
shove him aside; meanwhile he shelved his parent, accord¬ 
ing to the manners of energy. 


270 


THE EGOIST 


One should not be a critic of our works of Art in uncom 
fortable garments. Vernon turned from the portraits to a 
stuffed pike in a glass-case, and plunged into sympathy with 
the fish for a refuge. 

Clara soon rejoined him, saying : “ But you, you must be 
very wet. You are without an umbrella. You must be 
wet through, Mr. Whitford.” 

“ We ’re all wet through to-day,” said Vernon. “ Cross¬ 
jay ’s wet through, and a tramp he met.” 

“ The horrid man! But Crossjay should have turned back 
when I told him. Cannot the landlord assist you ? You 
are not tied to time. I begged Crossjay to turn back when 
it began to rain: when it became heavy I compelled him. 
So you met my poor Crossjay ?” 

“You have not to blame him for betraying you. The 
tramp did that. I was thrown on your track quite by acci¬ 
dent. Now pardon me for using authority: and don’t be 
alarmed, Miss Middleton ; you are perfectly free for me; 
but you must not run a risk to your health. I met Dr. 
Corney coming along, and he prescribed hot brandy and 
water for a wet skin ; especially for sitting in it. There’s 
the stuff on the table; I see you have been aware of a sin¬ 
gular odour; you must consent to sip some, as medicine; 
merely to give you warmth.” 

“ Impossible, Mr. Whitford: I could not taste it. But 
pray obey Dr. Corney, if he ordered it for you.” 

“ I can’t unless you do.” 

“ I will, then : I will try.” 

She held the glass, attempted, and was baffled by the reek 
of it. 

“ Try : you can do anything,” said Vernon. 

“ Now that you find me here, Mr. Whitford ! Anything 
for myself, it would seem, and nothing to save a friend. 
But I will really try.” 

“ It must be a good mouthful.” 

“ I will try. And you will finish the glass ? ” 

“With your permission, if you do not leave too much.” 

They were to drink out of the same glass ; and she was to 
drink some of this infamous mixture : and she was in a kind 
of hotel alone with him : and he was drenched in running 
after her : — all this came of breaking loose for an hour J 


AT THE RAILWAY STATION 


271 


“ Oh! what a misfortune that it should be such a day. 
Mr. Whitford.” 

“ Did you not choose the day ? ” 

“ Not the weather.” 

“ And the worst of it is, that Willoughby will come upon 
Crossjay wet to the bone, and pump him and get nothing 
but shufflings, blank lies, and then find him out and chase 
him from the house.” 

Clara drank immediately, and more than she intended. 
She held the glass as an enemy to be delivered from, gasp¬ 
ing, uncertain of her breath. 

“Never let me be asked to endure such a thing again ! ” 

“You are unlikely to be running away from father and 
friends again.” 

She panted still with the fiery liquid she had gulped: and 
she wondered that it should belie its reputation in not for¬ 
tifying her, but rendering her painfully susceptible to his 
remarks. 

“ Mr. Whitford, I need not seek to know what you think 
of me.” 

“ What I think ? I don’t think at all; I wish to serve 
you, if I can.” 

“ Am I right in supposing you a little afraid of me ? 
You should not be. I have deceived no one. I have 
opened my heart to you, and am not ashamed of having 
done so.” 

“ It is an excellent habit, they say.” 

“ It is not a habit with me.” 

He was touched, and for that reason, in his dissatisfaction 
with himself, not unwilling to hurt. “ We take our turn, 
Miss Middleton. I’m no hero, and a bad conspirator, so I 
am not of much avail.” 

“ You have been reserved — but I am going, and I leave 
my character behind. You condemned me to the poison- 
bowl ; you have not touched it yourself.” 

“ In vino veritas: if I do I shall be speaking my mind.” 

“ Then do, for the sake of mind and body.” 

“ It won’t be complimentary.” 

“ You can be harsh. Only say everything.” 

“ Have we time ? ” 

They looked at their watches. 


272 


THE EGOIST 


“ Six minutes,” Clara said. 

Vernon’s had stopped, penetrated by his total drenching. 

She reproached herself. He laughed to quiet her. “ My 
dies solemnes are sure to give me duckings; I’m used to 
them. As for the watch, it will remind me that it stopped 
when you went.” 

She raised the glass to him. She was happier and hoped 
for some little harshness and kindness mixed that she might 
carry away to travel with and think over. 

He turned the glass as she had given it, turned it round 
in putting it to his lips : a scarce perceptible manoeuvre, but 
that she had given it expressly on one side. 

It may be hoped that it was not done by design. Done 
even accidentally, without a taint of contrivance, it was an 
affliction to see, and coiled through her, causing her to 
shrink and redden. 

Fugitives are subject to strange incidents; they are not 
vessels lying safe in harbour. She shut her lips tight, as 
if they had been stung. The realizing sensitiveness of her 
quick nature accused them of a loss of bloom. And the 
man who made her smart like this was formal as a railway- 
official on a platform! 

“ Now we are both pledged in the poison-bowl,” said he. 
“ And it has the taste of rank poison, I confess. But the 
doctor prescribed it, and at sea we must be sailors. Now, 
Miss Middleton, time presses : will you return with me ? ” 

“ No ! no ! ” 

“ Where do you propose to go ? ” 

“ To London; to a friend— Miss Darleton.” 

“ What message is there for your father ? ” 

“ Say, I have left a letter for him in a letter to be 
delivered to you.” 

“ To me. And what message for Willoughby ? ” 

“ My maid Barclay will hand him a letter at noon.” 

“ You have sealed Crossjay’s fate.” 

" How ? ” 

“ He is probably at this instant undergoing an interroga¬ 
tion. You may guess at his replies. The letter will expose 
him, and Willoughby does not pardon.” 

“ I regret it. I cannot avoid it. Poor boy! My dear 
Crossjay ! I did not think of how Willoughby might punish 


AT THE KAIL WAY STATION 


m 


him. I was very thoughtless. Mr. Whitford, my pin-money 
shall go for his education. Later, when I am a little older, 
I shall be able to support him.” 

“ That’s an encumbrance ; you should not tie yourself to 
drag it about. You are inalterable, of course, but circum¬ 
stances are not, and as it happens, women are more subject 
to them than we are.” 

“ But I will not be! ” 

“ Your command of them is shown at the present 
moment.” 

“ Because I determine to be free ? ” 

“ No: because you do the contrary ; you don’t determine; 
you run away from the difficulty, and leave it to your father 
and friends to bear. As for Crossjay, you see you destroy 
one of his chances. I should have carried him off before 
this, if I had not thought it prudent to keep him on terms 
with Willoughby. We’ll let Crossjay stand aside. He’ll 
behave like a man of honour, imitating others who have had 
to do the same for ladies.” 

“ Have spoken falsely to shelter cowards, you mean, Mr. 
Whitford. Oh! I know. — I have but two minutes. The 
die is cast. I cannot go back. I must get ready. Will you 
see me to the station ? I would rather you should hurry 
home.” 

“ I will see the last of you. I will wait for you here. An 
express runs ahead of your train, and I have arranged with 
the clerk for a signal; I have an eye on the window.” 

“You are still my best friend, Mr. Whitford.” 

“ Though — ? ” 

“ Well, though you do not perfectly understand what 
torments have driven me to this.” 

“ Carried on tides and blown by winds ? ” 

“ Ah ! you do not understand.” 

“ Mysteries ? ” 

“Sufferings are not mysteries, they are very simple 
facts.” 

“ Well, then, I don’t understand. But decide at once. I 
wish you to have your free will.” 

She left the room. 

Dry stockings and boots are better for travelling in than 
wet ones, but in spite of her direct resolve, she felt when 


274 


THE EGOIST 


drawing them on like one that has been tripped. The goal 
was desirable, the ardour was damped. Vernon’s wish 
that she should have her free will, compelled her to sound 
it: and it was of course to go, to be liberated, to cast off 
incubus: — and hurt her father? injure Crossjay? distress 
her friends ? No, and ten times no ! 

She returned to Vernon in haste, to shun the reflex of 
her mind. 

He was looking at a closed carriage drawn up at the 
station-door. 

“ Shall we run over now, Mr. Whitford ? ” 

“There’s no signal. Here it’s not so chilly.” 

“ I ventured to enclose my letter to papa in yours, trusti¬ 
ng you would attend to my request to you to break the 
lews to him gently and plead for me.” 

“We will all do the utmost we can.” 

“ I am doomed to vex those who care for me. I tried to 
follow your counsel.” 

“ First you spoke to me, and then you spoke to Miss 
Dale; and at least you have a clear conscience.” 

“No.” 

“ What burdens it ? ” 

“ I have done nothing to burden it.” 

“ Then it *s a clear conscience ? ” 

“No.” 

Vernon’s shoulders jerked. Our patience with an inno¬ 
cent duplicity in women is measured by the place it assigns 
to us and another. If he had liked he could have thought: 
“You have not done but meditated something to trouble con¬ 
science.” That was evident, and her speaking of it was 
proof too of the willingness to be clear. He would not help 
her. Man’s blood, which is the link with women and re¬ 
sponsive to them on the instant for or against, obscured 
him. He shrugged anew when she said: “My character 
would have been degraded utterly by my staying there. 
Could you advise it ? ” 

“Certainly not the degradation of your character,” he 
said, black on the subject of De Craye, and not lightened by 
feelings which made him sharply sensible of the beggarly 
dependant that he was, or poor adventuring scribbler that 
he was to become. 


AT TILE RAILWAY STATION 


275 


“ Why did you pursue me and wish to stop me, Mr. 
Whitford ? ” said Clara, on the spur of a wound from his 
tone. 

He replied: “ I suppose I’m a busybody: I was never 
aware of it till now.” 

“ You are my friend. Only you speak in irony so much. 
That was irony, about my clear conscience. I spoke to 
you and to Miss Dale: and then I rested and drifted. Can 
you not feel for me, that to mention it is like a scorching 
furnace ? Willoughby has entangled papa. He schemes 
incessantly to keep me entangled. I fly from his cunning 
as much as from anything I dread it. I have told you that 
I am more to blame than he, but I must accuse him. 
And wedding-presents! and congratulations ! And to be 
his guest!” 

“ All that makes up a plea in mitigation,” said Vernon. 

“ It is not sufficient for you ? ” she asked him timidly. 

“You have a masculine good sense that tells you you 
won’t be respected if you run. Three more days there 
might cover a retreat with your father.” 

“He will not listen to me! He confuses me; Willoughby 
has bewitched him.” 

“ Commission me : I will see that he listens.” 

“ And go back ? Oh! no. To London! Besides there is 
the dining with Mrs. Mountstuart this evening; and I like 
her very well, but I must avoid her. She has a kind of 
idolatry . . . And what answers can I give ? I supplicate 
her with looks. She observes them, my efforts to divert 
them from being painful produce a comic expression to her, 
and I am a charming ‘ rogue,’ and I am entertained on the 
topic she assumes to be principally interesting me. I must 
avoid her. The thought of her leaves me no choice. She 
is clever. She could tattoo me with epigrams.” 

“ Stay: there you can hold your own.” 

“ She has told me you give me credit for a spice of wit. 
I have not discovered my possession. We have spoken of 
it; we call it your delusion. She grants me some beauty; 
that must be hers.” 

“There ’s no delusion in one case or the other, Miss Mid¬ 
dleton. You have beauty and wit: public opinion will 
say, wildness: indifference to your reputation, will be 


276 


THE EGOIST 


charged on you, and your friends will have to admit it 
But you will be out of this difficulty.” 

“ Ah! — to weave a second ? ” 

“ Impossible to judge until we see how you escape the 
first. — And I have no more to say. I love your father. 
His humour of sententiousness and doctorial stilts is a 
mask he delights in, but you ought to know him and not be 
frightened by it. If you sat with him an hour at a Latin 
task, and if you took his hand and told him you could not 
leave him, and no tears! — he would answer you at once. 
It would involve a day or two further: disagreeable to you, 
no doubt: preferable to the present mode of escape, as I 
think. But I have no power whatever to persuade. I have 
not the ‘ lady’s tongue.’ My appeal is always to reason.” 

“It is a compliment. I loathe the ‘ lady’s tongue.’ ” 

“It’s a distinctly good gift, and I wish I had it. I 
might have succeeded instead of failing, and appearing to 
pay a compliment.” 

“ Surely the express train is very late, Mr. Whitford ? ” 

“The express has gone by.” 

“Then we will cross over.” 

“You would rather not be seen by Mrs. Mountstuart. 
That is her carriage drawn up at the station, and she is 
in it.” 

Clara looked, and with the sinking of her heart said: 
“ I must brave her! ” 

“ In that case, I will take my leave of you here, Miss 
Middleton.” 

She gave him her hand. “Why is Mrs. Mountstuart 
at the station to-day ? ” 

“ I suppose she has driven to meet one of the guests for 
her dinner-party. Professor Crooklyn was promised to 
your father, and he may be coming by the down-train.” 

“ Go back to the Hall! ” exclaimed Clara. “ How can I ? 
I have no more endurance left in me. If I had some sup¬ 
port!— if it were the sense of secretly doing wrong, it 
might help me through. I am in a web. I cannot do 
right, whatever I do. There is only the thought of sav¬ 
ing Crossjay. Yes, and sparing papa. — Good-bye, Mr. 
Whitford. I shall remember your kindness gratefully. I 
cannot go back.” 


THE RETURN 


277 


“You will not ?” said he, tempting her to hesitate. 

“No.” 

“ But if you are seen by Mrs. Mountstuart, you must go 
back. I ’ll do my best to take her away. Should she see 
you, you must patch up a story and apply to her for a lift. 
That, I think, is imperative.” 

“Not to my mind,” said Clara. 

He bowed hurriedly and withdrew. After her confes¬ 
sion, peculiar to her, of possibly finding sustainment in 
secretly doing wrong, her flying or remaining seemed to 
him a choice of evils: and whilst she stood in bewildered 
speculation on his reason for pursuing her — which was 
not evident — he remembered the special fear inciting him, 
and so far did her justice as to have at himself on that 
subject. He had done something perhaps to save her 
from a cold: such was his only consolatory thought. He 
had also behaved like a man of honour, taking no personal 
advantage of her situation; but to reflect on it recalled his 
astonishing dryness. The strict man of honour plays a 
part that he should not reflect on till about the fall of the 
curtain, otherwise he will be likely sometimes to feel the 
shiver of foolishness at his good conduct. 


CHAPTER XXVIII 

THE RETURN 

Posted in observation at a corner of the window, Clara 
saw Vernon cross the road to Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkin- 
son’s carriage, transformed to the leanest pattern of him¬ 
self by narrowed shoulders and raised coat-collar. He had 
such an air of saying, “Tom’s a-cold,” that her skin crept 
in sympathy. 

Presently he left the carriage and went into the station: 
a bell had rung. Was it her train ? He approved her 
going, for he was employed in assisting her to go: a pro¬ 
ceeding at variance with many things he had said, but he 
was as full of contradiction to-day as women are accused 



THE EGOIST 


of being. The train came up. She trembled: no signal 
had appeared, and Vernon must have deceived her. 

He returned; he entered the carriage, and the wheels 
were soon in motion. Immediately thereupon, Flitch’s 
fly drove past, containing Colonel De Craye. 

Vernon could not but have perceived him! 

But what was it that had brought the colonel to this 
place ? The pressure of Vernon’s mind was on her and 
foiled her efforts to assert her perfect innocence, though 
she knew she had done nothing to allure the colonel 
hither. Excepting Willoughby, Colonel De Craye was the 
last person she would have wished to encounter. 

She had now a dread of hearing the bell w T hich would 
tell her that Vernon had not deceived her, and that she 
was out of his hands, in the hands of some one else. 

She bit at her glove; she glanced at the concentrated 
eyes of the publican’s family portraits, all looking as one; 
she noticed the empty tumbler, and went round to it and 
touched it, and the silly spoon in it. 

A little yielding to desperation shoots us to strange 
distances! 

Vernon had asked her whether she was alone. Connect¬ 
ing that inquiry, singular in itself, and singular in his 
manner of putting it, with the glass of burning liquid, she 
repeated: “ He must have seen Colonel De Craye! ” and 
she stared at the empty glass, as at something that wit¬ 
nessed to something: for Vernon was not your supple cava¬ 
lier assiduously on the smirk to pin a gallantry to common¬ 
places. But all the doors are not open in a young lady’s 
consciousness, quick of nature though she may be: some 
are locked and keyless, some will not open to the key, 
some are defended by ghosts inside. She could not have 
said what the something witnessed to. If we by chance 
know more, we have % still no right to make it more promi¬ 
nent than it was with her. And the smell of the glass 
was odious; it disgraced her. She had an impulse to 
pocket the spoon for a memento, to show it to grandchil¬ 
dren for a warning. Even the prelude to the morality to 
be uttered on the occasion sprang to her lips: “Here, my 
.dears, is a spoon you would be ashamed to use in your tea¬ 
cups, yet it was of more value to me at one period of my 


THE RETURN 


279 


life than silver and gold in pointing out, &c.the con¬ 
clusion was hazy, like the conception; she had her idea. 

And in this mood she ran downstairs and met Colonel 
De Craye on the station steps. 

The bright illumination of his face was that of the 
confident man confirmed in a risky guess in the crisis of 
doubt and dispute. 

“ Miss Middleton! ” his joyful surprise predominated: 
the pride of an accurate forecast, adding: “I am not too 
late to be of service ? ” 

She thanked him for the offer. 

“ Have you dismissed the fly, Colonel De Craye ? ” 

“ I have just been getting change to pay Mr. Flitch. He 
passed me on the road. He is interwound with our fates, 
to a certainty. I had only to jump in; I knew it, and 
rolled along like a magician commanding a genie.” 

“Have I been . . .?” 

“Not seriously, nobody doubts your being under shelter. 
You will allow me to protect you ? My time is yours.” 

“ I was thinking of a running visit to my friend Miss 
Darleton.” 

“ May I venture ? I had the fancy that you wished to see 
Miss Darleton to-day. You cannot make the journey 
unescorted.” 

“Please retain the fly. Where is Willoughby ?” 

“He is in jack-boots. But may I not, Miss Middleton ? 
I shall never be forgiven, if you refuse me.” 

" There has been searching for me ? ” 

“ Some hallooing. But why am I rejected ? Besides I 
don’t require the fly; I shall walk if I am banished. 
Flitch is a wonderful conjuror, but the virtue is out of him 
for the next four and twenty hours. And it will be an 
opportunity to me to make my bow to Miss Darleton! ” 

“She is rigorous on the conventionalities, Colonel De 
Craye. ” 

“ I ’ll appear before her as an ignoramus or a rebel, 
whichever she likes best to take in leading strings. I re¬ 
member her. I was greatly struck by her.” 

“Upon recollection!” 

“ Memory did n’t happen to be handy at the first mention 
of the lady’s name. As the general said of his ammunition 


280 


THE EGOIST 


and transport, there ’s the army! — but it was leagues in 
the rear. Like the footman who went to sleep after 
smelling fire in the house, I was thinking of other things. 
It will serve me right to be forgotten — if I am. I ’ve a 
curiosity to know: a remainder of my coxcombry. Not 
that exactly: a wish to see the impression I made on your 
friend. — None at all ? But any pebble casts a ripple.” 

“That is hardly an impression,” said Clara, pacifying 
her irresoluteness with this light talk. 

“ The utmost to be hoped for by men like me! I have 
your permission ? — one minute — I will get my ticket.” 

“Do not,” said Clara. 

“Your man-servant entreats you! ” 

She signified a decided negative with the head, but her 
eyes were dreamy. She breathed deep: this thing done 
would cut the cord. Her sensation of languor swept over 
her. 

De Craye took a stride. He was accosted by one of the 
railway-porters. Flitch’s fly was in request for a gentle¬ 
man. A portly old gentleman bothered about luggage 
appeared on the landing. 

“The gentleman can have it,” said De Craye, handing 
Flitch his money. 

“Open the door,” Clara said to Flitch. 

He tugged at the handle with enthusiasm. The door 
was open: she stepped in. 

“Then, mount the box and I ’ll jump up beside you,” De 
Craye called out, after the passion of regretful astonish¬ 
ment had melted from his features. 

Clara directed him to the seat fronting her; he protested 
indifference to the wet; she kept the door unshut. His 
temper would have preferred to buffet the angry weather. 
The invitation was too sweet. 

She heard now the bell of her own train. Driving be¬ 
side the railway embankment she met the train: it was 
eighteen minutes late, by her watch. And why, when it 
flung up its whale-spouts of steam, she was not journeying 
in it she could not tell. She had acted of her free will: 
that she could say. Vernon had not induced her to remain; 
assuredly her present companion had not; and her whole 
heart was for flight: yet she was driving back to the Hall, 


THE RETURN 


281 


not devoid of calmness. She speculated on the circumstance 
enough to think herself incomprehensible, and there left it, 
intent on the scene to come with Willoughby. 

"I must choose a better day for London,” she remarked. 

De Graye bowed, but did not remove his eyes from 
her. 

“Miss Middleton, you do not trust me.” 

She answered: “ Say in what way. It seems to me thait 
I do.” 

“ I may speak ? ” 

“If it depends on my authority.” 

“Fully?” 

“ Whatever you have to say. Let me stipulate, be not 
very grave. I want cheering in wet weather.” 

“ Miss Middleton, Flitch is charioteer once more. 
Think of it. There ’s a tide that carries him perpetually 
to the place whence he was cast forth, and a thread that 
ties us to him in continuity. I have not the honour to be 
a friend of long standing: one ventures on one’s devotion : 
it dates from the first moment of my seeing you. Flitch 
is to blame, if any one. Perhaps the spell would be 
broken, were he reinstated in his ancient office.” 

“Perhaps it would,” said Clara, not with her best of 
smiles. Willoughby’s pride of relentlessness appeared to 
her to be receiving a blow by rebound, and that seemed 
high justice. 

“I am afraid you were right; the poor fellow has no 
chance,” De Craye pursued. He paused, as for decorum in 
the presence of misfortune, and laughed sparklingly: 
“ Unless I engage him, or pretend to! I verily believe 
that Flitch’s melancholy person on the skirts of the Hall 
completes the picture of the Eden within. — Why will you 
not put some trust in me, Miss Middleton ? ” 

“ But why should you not pretend to engage him, then, 
Colonel De Craye ? ” 

“ We ’ll plot it, if you like. Can you trust me for 
that?” 

“For any act of disinterested kindness, I am sure.” 

“You mean it ?” 

“Without reserve. You could talk publicly of taking 
him to London.” 


282 


THE EGOIST 


“ Miss Middleton, just now you were going. My arrival 
changed your mind. You distrust me: and ought I to 
wonder ? The wonder would be all the other way. You 
have not had the sort of report of me which would per¬ 
suade you to confide, even in a case of extremity. I 
guessed you were going. Do you ask me, how ? I cannot 
say. Through what they call sympathy, and that’s inex¬ 
plicable. There ’s natural sympathy, natural antipathy. 
People have to live together to discover how deep 
it is! ” 

Clara breathed her dumb admission of this truth. 

The fly jolted and threatened to lurch. 

“Flitch! my dear man! ” the colonel gave a murmuring 
remonstrance; “for,” said he to Clara, whom his apos¬ 
trophe to Flitch had set smiling, “ we ’re not safe with him, 
however we make believe, and he ’ll be jerking the heart 
out of me before he has done. — But if two of us have not 
the misfortune to be united when they come to the discov¬ 
ery, there’s hope. That is, if one has courage, and the 
other has wisdom. Otherwise they may go to the yoke in 
spite of themselves. The great enemy is Pride, who has 
them both in a coach and drives them to the fatal door, 
and the only thing to do is to knock him off his box while 
there’s a minute to spare. And as there’s no pride like 
the pride of possession, the deadliest wound to him is to 
make that doubtful. Pride won’t be taught wisdom in 
any other fashion. But one must have the courage to 
do it! ” 

De Craye trifled with the window-sash, to give his words 
time to sink in solution. 

Who but Willoughby stood for Pride? And who, 
swayed by languor, had dreamed of a method that would 
be surest and swiftest to teach him the wisdom of surren¬ 
dering her ? 

“You know, Miss Middleton, I study character,” said 
the colonel. 

“I see that you do,” she answered. 

“You intend to return ?” 

“Oh! decidedly.” 

“The day is unfavourable for travelling, I must say.” 

“It is.” 


THE RETURN 


283 


“You may count on my discretion in the fullest degree. 
I throw myself on your generosity when I assure you 
that it was not my design to surprise a secret. I guessed 
the station, and went there, to put myself at your 
disposal.” 

“ Did you, ” said Clara, reddening slightly, “ chance to 
see Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson’s carriage pass you when 
you drove up to the station ? ” 

De Craye had passed a carriage. “I did not see the 
lady. She was in it ? ” 

“Yes. And therefore it is better to put discretion on 
one side: we may be certain she saw you.” 

“But not you, Miss Middleton ?” 

“I prefer to think that I am seen. I have a descrip¬ 
tion of courage, Colonel De Craye, when it is forced on 
me.” 

“I have not suspected the reverse. Courage wants 
training, as well as other fine capacities. Mine is often 
rusty and rheumatic.” 

“I cannot hear of concealment or plotting.” 

“Except, pray, to advance the cause of poor Flitch! ” 

“He shall be excepted.” 

The colonel screwed his head round for a glance at his 
coachman’s back. 

“Perfectly guaranteed to-day ! ” he said of Flitch’s look 
of solidity. “ The convulsion of the elements appears tc 
sober our friend; he is only dangerous in calms. Five 
minutes will bring us to the park-gates.” 

Clara leaned forward to gaze at the hedgeways in the 
neighbourhood of the Hall, strangely renewing their 
familiarity with her. Both in thought and sensation she 
was like a flower beaten to earth, and she thanked her fem¬ 
inine mask for not showing how nerveless and languid she 
was. She could have accused Yernon of a treacherous 
cunning for imposing it on her free will to decide her 
fate. 

Involuntarily she sighed. 

“There is a train at three,” said De Craye, with splen* 
did promptitude. 

“Yes, and one at five. We dine with Mrs. Mouutstuar* 
to-night. And I have a passion for solitude! I think 1 


284 


THE EGOIST 


was never intended for obligations. The moment I am 
bound I begin to brood on freedom.” 

‘‘Ladies who say that, Miss Middleton! . . 

“ What of them ? ” 

“They ’re feeling too much alone.” 

She could not combat the remark: by her self-assurance 
that she had the principle of faithfulness, she acknowl¬ 
edged to herself the truth of it: — there is no freedom for 
the weak! Vernon had said that once. She tried to resist 
the weight of it, and her sheer inability precipitated her 
into a sense of pitiful dependence. 

Half an hour earlier it would have been a perilous con¬ 
dition to be traversing in the society of a closely-scanning 
reader of fair faces. Circumstances had changed. They 
were at the gates of the park. 

“ Shall I leave you ? ” said De Craye. 

“ Why should you ? ” she replied. 

He bent to her gracefully. 

The mild subservience flattered Clara’s languor. He had 
not compelled her to be watchful on her guard, and she was 
unaware that he passed it when she acquiesced to his obser¬ 
vation: “An anticipatory story is a trap to the teller.” 

“It is,” she said. She had been thinking as much. 

He threw up his head to consult the brain comically 
with a dozen little blinks. 

“Ho, you are right, Miss Middleton, inventing before¬ 
hand never prospers; ’t is a way to trip our own cleverness. 
Truth and mother-wit are the best counsellors: and as you 
are the former, I ’ll try to act up to the character you 
assign me.” 

Some tangle, more prospective than present, seemed to 
be about her as she reflected. But her intention being to 
speak to Willoughby without subterfuge, she was grateful 
to her companion for not tempting her to swerve. Ho one 
could doubt his talent for elegant fibbing, and she was in 
the humour both to admire and adopt the art, so she was 
glad to be rescued from herself. How mother-wit was to 
second truth, she did not inquire, and as she did not happen 
to be thinking of Crossjay, she was not troubled by hav¬ 
ing to consider how truth and his tale of the morning would 
be likely to harmonize. 


SIR WILLOUGHBY RECEIVES INSTRUCTION 285 


Driving down the park she had full occupation in ques¬ 
tioning whether her return would be pleasing to Vernon, 
who was the virtual cause of it, though he had done so 
little to promote it: so little that she really doubted hiS| 
pleasure in seeing her return. 


CHAPTER XXIX 

IN WHICH THE SENSITIVENESS OF SIR WILLOUGHBY IS 

explained: and HE receives much instruction 

The Hall-clock over the stables was then striking twelve. 
It was the hour for her flight to be made known, and Clara 
sat in a turmoil of dim apprehension that prepared her 
nervous frame for a painful blush on her being asked by 
Colonel De Craye whether she had set her watch correctly. 
He must, she understood, have seen through her at the 
breakfast-table: and was she not cruelly indebted to him 
for her evasion of Willoughby ? Such perspicacity of vision 
distressed and frightened her; at the same time she was 
obliged to acknowledge that he had not presumed on it. 
Her dignity was in no way the worse for him. But it had 
been at a man’s mercy, and there was the affliction. 

She jumped from the fly as if she were leaving danger 
behind. She could at the moment have greeted Wil¬ 
loughby with a conventionally friendly smile. The doors 
were thrown open and young Crossjay flew out to her. 
He hung and danced on her hand, pressed the hand to 
his mouth, hardly believing that he saw and touched her, 
and in a lingo of dashes and asterisks related how Sir 
Willoughby had found him under the boathouse eaves and 
pumped him, and had been sent off to Hoppner’s farm, 
where there was a sick child, and on along the road to a 
labourer’s cottage: “Eor I said you’re so kind to poor 
people, Miss Middleton; that’s true, now that is true. 
And I said you would n’t have me with you for fear of con¬ 
tagion ! ” This was what she had feared. 



286 


THE EGOIST 


“Every crack and bang in a boy’s vocabulary?” re¬ 
marked the colonel, listening to him after he had paid 
Flitch. 

The latter touched his hat till he had drawn attention to 
himself, when he exclaimed with rosy melancholy: “ Ah ! 
my lady, ah! colonel, if ever I lives to drink some of the 
old port wine in the old Hall at Christmastide! ” Their 
healths would on that occasion be drunk, it was implied. 
He threw up his eyes at the windows, humped his body 
and drove away. 

“ Then Mr. Whitford has not come back ? ” said Clara to 
Crossjay. 

“No, Miss Middleton. Sir Willoughby has, and he’s 
upstairs in his room dressing.” 

“ Have you seen Barclay ? ” 

“ She has just gone into the laboratory. I told her Sir 
Willoughby was n’t there.” 

“ Tell me, Crossjay, had she a letter ? ” 

“She had something.” 

“Run: say I am here; I want the letter, it is mine.” 

Crossjay sprang away and plunged into the arms of Sir 
Willoughby. 

“ One has to catch the fellow like a football, ” exclaimed 
the injured gentleman, doubled across the boy and hold¬ 
ing him fast, that he might have an object to trifle with, 
to give himself countenance: he needed it. “Clara, you 
have not been exposed to the weather ? ” 

“Hardly at all.” 

“ I rejoice. You found shelter ? ” 

“Yes.” 

“ In one of the cottages ? ” 

“Not in a cottage; but I was perfectly sheltered. 
Colonel De Craye passed a fly before he met me ...” 

“Flitch again!” ejaculated the colonel. 

“Yes, you have luck, you have luck,” Willoughby ad¬ 
dressed him, still clutching Crossjay and treating his tugs 
to get loose as an invitation to caresses. But the foil 
barely concealed his livid perturbation. 

“Stay by me, sir,” he said at last sharply to Crossjay, 
and Clara touched the boy’s shoulder in admonishment 
of him. 


SIR WILLOUGHBY RECEIVES INSTRUCTION 287 


She turned to the colonel as they stepped into the hall: 
“ I have not thanked you, Colonel De Craye.” She dropped 
her voice to its lowest: “A letter in my handwriting in 
the laboratory.” 

Crossjay cried aloud with pain. 

“I have you ! ” Willoughby rallied him with a laugh not 
unlike the squeak of his victim. 

“ You squeeze awfully hard, sir! ” 

“ Why, you milksop! ” 

“Am I! But I want to get a book.” 

“ Where is the book ? ” 

“In the laboratory.” 

Colonel De Craye, sauntering by the laboratory door, 
sung out: “ I ’ll fetch you your book. What is it ? Early 
Navigators ? Infant Hymns ? I think my cigar case 
is in here.” 

“Barclay speaks of a letter for me,” Willoughby said to 
Clara, “ marked to be delivered to me at noon! ” 

“ In case of my not being back earlier: it was written 
to avert anxiety,” she replied. 

“You are very good.” 

“Oh! good! Call me anything but good. Here are the 
ladies. Dear ladies ! ” Clara swam to meet them as they 
issued from a morning-room into the hall, and interjections 
reigned for a couple of minutes. 

Willoughby relinquished his grasp of Crossjay, who 
darted instantaneously at an angle to the laboratory, 
whither he followed, and he encountered De Craye coming 
out, but passed him in silence. 

Crossjay was rangeing and peering all over the room. 
Willoughby went to his desk and the battery-table and the 
mantelpiece. He found no letter. Barclay had undoubt¬ 
edly informed him that she had left a letter for him in 
the laboratory, by order of her mistress after breakfast. 
He hurried out and ran upstairs in time to see De Craye 
and Barclay breaking a conference. 

He beckoned to her. The maid lengthened her upper 
lip and beat her dress down smooth: signs of the appre¬ 
hension of a crisis and of the getting ready for action. 

“ My mistress's bell has just rung, Sir Willoughby.” 

“You had a letter for me.” 


288 


THE EGOIST 


“ I said . . . ” 

“You said when I met you at the foot of the stairs that 
you had left a letter for me in the laboratory.” 

“It is lying on my mistress’s toilet-table.” 

“Get it.” 

Barclay swept round with another of her demure 
grimaces. It was apparently necessary with her that she 
should talk to herself in this public manner. 

Willoughby waited for her; but there was no reappear¬ 
ance of the maid. 

Struck by the ridicule of his posture of expectation and 
of his whole behaviour, he went to his bedroom suite, shut 
himself in and paced the chambers, amazed at the creature 
he had become. Agitated like the commonest of wretches, 
destitute of self-control, not able to preserve a decent 
mask, he, accustomed to inflict these emotions and tremours 
upon others, was at once the puppet and dupe of an in¬ 
triguing girl. His very stature seemed lessened. The 
glass did not say so, but the shrunken heart within him 
did, and wailfully too. Her compunction — “ Call me any¬ 
thing but good ” — coming after her return to the Hall 
beside De Craye, and after the visible passage of a secret 
between them in his presence, was a confession: it blew 
at him with the fury of a furnace-blast in his face. Egoist 
agony wrung the outcry from him that dupery is a more 
blest condition. He desired to be deceived. 

He could desire such a thing only in a temporary trans¬ 
port; for above all he desired that no one should know of 
his being deceived: and were he a dupe the deceiver would 
know it, and her accomplice would know it, and the world 
would soon know of it: that world against whose tongue 
he stood defenceless. Within the shadow of his presence 
he compressed opinion, as a strong frost binds the springs 
of earth, but beyond it his shivering sensitiveness ran 
about in dread of a stripping in a wintry atmosphere. 
This was the ground of his hatred of the world: it was an 
appalling fear on behalf of his naked eidolon, the tender 
infant Self swaddled in his name before the world, for 
which he felt as the most highly civilized of men alone can 
feel, and which it was impossible for him to stretch out 
hands to protect. There the poor little loveable creature 


SIR WILLOUGHBY RECEIVES INSTRUCTION 289 

ran for any mouth to blow on; and frost-nipped and 
bruised, it cried to him, and he was of no avail! Must we 
not detest a world that so treats us ? We loathe it the more, 
by the measure of our contempt for them, when we have 
made the people within the shadow-circle of our person 
slavish. 

And he had been once a young Prince in popularity: the 
world had been his possession. Clara’s treatment of him 
was a robbery of land and subjects. His grander dream 
had been a marriage with a lady of so glowing a fame for 
beauty and attachment to her lord that the world perforce 
must take her for witness to merits which would silence 
detraction and almost, not quite (it was undesireable) 
extinguish envy. But for the nature of women his dream 
would have been realized. He could not bring himself to 
denounce Fortune. It had cost him a grievous pang to 
tell Horace De Craye he was lucky; he had been educated 
in the belief that Fortune specially prized and cherished 
little Willoughby: hence of necessity his maledictions 
fell upon women, or he would have forfeited the last 
blanket of a dream warm as poets revel in. 

But if Clara deceived him, he inspired her with timidity. 
There was matter in that to make him wish to be de¬ 
ceived. She had not looked him much in the face: she 
had not crossed his eyes: she had looked deliberately 
downward, keeping her head up, to preserve an exterior 
pride. The attitude had its bewitchingness: the girl’s 
physical pride of stature scorning to bend under a load of 
conscious guilt, had a certain black-angel beauty for which 
he felt a hugging hatred: and according to his policy when 
these fits of amorous meditation seized him, he burst from 
the present one in the mood of his more favourable con¬ 
ception of Clara, and sought her out. 

The quality of the mood of hugging hatred is, that if 
you are disallowed the hug, you do not hate the fiercer. 

Contrariwise the prescription of a decorous distance of 
two feet ten inches, which is by measurement the delimi¬ 
tation exacted of a rightly respectful deportment, has this 
miraculous effect on the great creature man, or often it 
has: that his peculiar hatred returns to the reluctant ad¬ 
miration begetting it, and his passion for the hug falls 


290 


THE EGOIST 


prostrate as one of the Faithful before the shrine: he is 
reduced to worship by fasting. 

(For these mysteries, consult the sublime chapter in the 
Great Book, the Seventy-First on Love, wherein Nothing 
is written, but the Reader receives a Lanthorn, a Powder- 
cask and a Pick-axe, and therewith pursues his yellow- 
dusking path across the rubble of preceding excavators in 
the solitary quarry: a yet more instructive passage than 
the over-scrawled Seventieth, or French Section, whence 
the chapter opens, and where hitherto the polite world 
has halted.) 

The hurry of the hero is on us, we have no time to spare 
for mining-works: he hurried to catch her alone, to wreak 
his tortures on her in a bitter semblance of bodily worship, 
and satiated, then comfortably to spurn. He found her 
protected by Barclay on the stairs. 

“ That letter for me ? ” he said. 

“I think I told you, Willoughby, there was a letter I 
left with Barclay to reassure you in case of my not return¬ 
ing early,” said Clara. “It was unnecessary for her to 
deliver it.” 

“Indeed? But any letter, any writing, of yours, and 
from you to me! You have it still ? ” 

“No, I have destroyed it.” 

“That was wrong.” 

"“It could not have given you pleasure.” 

“My dear Clara, one line from you! ” 

“There were but three.” 

Barclay stood sucking her lips. A maid in the secrets 
of her mistress is a purchaseable maid, fat if she will take 
a bribe with her right hand she will witirner left; all that 
has to be calculated is the nature and amount of the bribe: 
such was the speculation indulged by Sir Willoughby, and 
he shrank from the thought and declined to know more 
than that he was on a volcanic hillside where a thin crust 
quaked over lava. This was a new condition with him, 
representing Clara’s gain in their combat. Clara did not 
fear his questioning so much as he feared her candour. 

Mutually timid, they were of course formally polite, and 
no plain-speaking could have told one another more dis¬ 
tinctly that each was defensive. Clara stood pledged to 


SIR WILLOUGHBY RECEIVES INSTRUCTION 291 


the fib; packed, sealed and posted; and he had only to ask 
to have it, supposing that he asked with a voice not exactly 
peremptory. 

She said in her heart: “ It is your fault: you are relent¬ 
less, and you would ruin Crossjay to punish him for devot¬ 
ing himself to me, like the poor thoughtless boy he is! and 
so I am bound in honour to do my utmost for him.” 

The reciprocal devotedness moreover served two pur¬ 
poses : it preserved her from brooding on the humiliation 
of her lame flight and flutter back, and it quieted her mind 
in regard to the precipitate intimacy of her relations with 
Colonel De Craye. Willoughby’s boast of his implacable 
character was to blame. She was at war with him, and 
she was compelled to put the case in that light. Crossjay 
must be shielded from one who could not spare an offender, 
so Colonel De Craye quite naturally was called on for his 
help, and the colonel’s dexterous aid appeared to her more 
admirable than alarming. 

Nevertheless she would not have answered a direct ques¬ 
tion falsely. She was for the fib, but not the lie; at a 
word she could be disdainful of subterfuges. Her look said 
that. Willoughby perceived it. She had written him a 
letter of three lines: “ There were but three: ” and she had 
destroyed the letter. Something perchance was repented 
by her ? Then she had done him an injury! Between 
his wrath at the suspicion of an injury, and the prudence 
enjoined by his abject coveting of her, he consented to be 
fooled for the sake of vengeance, and something besides. 

“ Well! here you are, safe: I have you! ” said he, with 
courtly exultation: “and that is better than your hand¬ 
writing. I have fifeen all over the country after you.” 

“ Why did you ? We are not in a barbarous land,” said 
Clara. 

“ Crossjay talks of your visiting a sick child, my love: 
— you have changed your dress ? ” 

“ You see.” 

“The boy declared you were going to that farm of Hopp- 
ner’s and some cottage. I met at my gates a tramping 
vagabond who swore to seeing you and the boy in a totally 
contrary direction.” 

“ Did you give him money ? 99 


292 


THE EGOIST 


“I fancy so.” 

“Then he was paid for having seen me.” 

Willoughby tossed his head: it might be as she sug¬ 
gested; beggars are liars. 

“But who sheltered you, my dear Clara ? You had not 
been heard of at Hoppner’s.” 

“The people have been indemnified for their pains. 
To pay them more would be to spoil them. You disperse 
money too liberally. There was no fever in the place. 
Who could have anticipated such a downpour ! I want to 
consult Miss Dale on the important theme of a dress I 
think of wearing at Mrs. Mountstuart’s to-night.” 

“Do. She is unerring.” 

“She has excellent taste.” 

“She dresses very simply herself.” 

“But it becomes her. She is one of the few women 
whom I feel I could not improve with a touch.” 

“She has judgement.” 

He reflected and repeated his encomium. 

The shadow of a dimple in Clara’s cheek awakened him 
to the idea that she had struck him somewhere: and cer¬ 
tainly he would never again be able to put up the fiction 
of her jealousy of Lsetitia. What, then, could be this 
girl’s motive for praying to be released ? The interroga¬ 
tion humbled him: he fled from the answer. 

Willoughby went in search of De Craye. That sprightly 
intriguer had no intention to let himself be caught solus. 
He was undiscoverable until the assembly sounded, when 
Clara dropped a public word or two, and he spoke in per¬ 
fect harmony with her. After that, he gave his company 
to Willoughby for an hour at billiards, and was well 
beaten. 

The announcement of a visit of Mrs. Mountstuart Jen- 
kinson took the gentlemen to the drawing-room, rather 
suspecting that something stood in the way of her dinner¬ 
party. As it happened, she was lamenting only the loss 
of one of the jewels of the party: to wit, the great Pro¬ 
fessor Crooklyn, invited to meet Dr. Middleton at her table; 
and she related how she had driven to the station by 
appointment, the professor being notoriously a bother¬ 
headed traveller: as was shown by the fact that he had 


SIR WILLOUGHBY RECEIVES INSTRUCTION 293 


missed his train in town, for he had not arrived; nothing 
had been seen of him. She cited Vernon Whitford for her 
authority that the train had been inspected and the plat¬ 
form scoured to find the professor. 

“And so,” said she, “I drove home your Green Man to 
dry him; he was wet through and chattering; the man was 
exactly like a skeleton wrapped in a sponge, and if he 
escapes a cold he must be as invulnerable as he boasts 
himself. These athletes are terrible boasters.” 

“They climb their Alps to crow,” said Clara, excited by 
her apprehension that Mrs. Mountstuart would speak of 
having seen the colonel near the station. 

There was a laugh, and Colonel De Craye laughed loudly 
as it flashed through him that a quick-witted impression¬ 
able girl like Miss Middleton must, before his arrival at 
the Hall, have speculated on such obdurate clay as Vernon 
Whitford was, with humourous despair at his uselessness 
to her. Glancing round, he saw Vernon standing fixed in 
a stare at the young lady. 

“ You heard that, Whitford ? ” he said, and Clara’s face 
betokening an extremer contrition than he thought was 
demanded, the colonel rallied the Alpine climber for striv¬ 
ing to be the tallest of them — Signor Excelsior! — and 
described these conquerors of mountains pancaked on the 
rocks in desperate embraces, bleached here, burnt there, 
barked all over, all to be able to say they had been up “ so 
high ” — had conquered another mountain ! He was ex¬ 
travagantly funny and self-satisfied: a conqueror of the 
sex having such different rewards of enterprise. 

Vernon recovered in time to accept the absurdities 
heaped on him. 

“Climbing peaks won’t compare with hunting a wrig¬ 
gler,” said he. 

His allusion to the incessant pursuit of young Crossjay 
to pin him to lessons was appreciated. 

Clara felt the thread of the look he cast from herself to 
Colonel De Craye. She was helpless, if he chose to mis¬ 
judge her. Colonel De Craye did not! 

Crossjay had the misfortune to enter the drawing-room 
while Mrs. Mountstuart was compassionating Vernon for 
his ducking in pursuit of the wriggler; which De Craye 


294 


THE EGOIST 


likened to “ going through the river after his eel: ” and 
immediately there was a cross-questioning of the boy be¬ 
tween De Craye and Willoughby on the subject of his latest 
truancy, each gentleman trying to run him down in a pal¬ 
pable hb. They were succeeding brilliantly when Vernon 
put a stop to it by marching him off to hard labour. Mrs. 
Mountstuart was led away to inspect the beautiful porcelain 
service, the present of Lady Busshe. “Porcelain again!” 
she said to Willoughby, and would have signalled to the 
“ dainty rogue ” to come with them, had not Clara been 
leaning over to Lsetitia, talking to her in an attitude too 
graceful to be disturbed. She called his attention to it, 
slightly wondering at his impatience. She departed to 
meet an afternoon train on the chance that it would land 
the professor. “But tell Dr. Middleton,” said she, “I fear 
I shall have no one worthy of him ! And,” she added to 
Willoughby, as she walked out to her carriage, “I shall 
expect you to do the great-gunnery talk at table.” 

“ Miss Dale keeps it up with him best,” said Willoughby. 

“ She does everything best! But my dinner-table is 
involved, and I cannot count on a young woman to talk 
across it. I would hire a lion of a menagerie, if one were 
handy, rather than have a famous scholar at my table 
unsupported by another famous scholar. Dr. Middleton 
would ride down a duke when the wine is in him. He 
will terrify my poor flock. The truth is, we can’t leaven 
him: I foresee undigested lumps of conversation, unless 
you devote yourself.” 

“ I will devote myself,” said Willoughby. 

“I can calculate on Colonel De Craye and our porcelain 
beauty for any quantity of sparkles, if you promise that. 
They play well together. You are not to be one of the 
Gods to-night, but a kind of Jupiter’s cupbearer; — Juno’s, 
if you like: and Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer, and all 
your admirers shall know subsequently what you have 
done. You see my alarm. I certainly did not rank Pro¬ 
fessor Crooklyn among the possibly faithless, or I never 
would have ventured on Dr. Middleton at my table. My 
dinner-parties have hitherto been all successes. Naturally 
I feel the greater anxiety about this one. For a single 
failure is all the more conspicuous. The exception is 


SIR WILLOUGHBY RECEIVES INSTRUCTION 295 


everlastingly cited! It is not so much what people say. 
but my own sentiments. I hate to fail. However, if you 
are true we may do.” 

“ Whenever the great gun goes off I will fall on my 
face, madam!” 

Something of that sort,” said the dame smiling, and 
leaving him to reflect on the egoism of women. For the 
sake of her dinner-party he was to be a cipher in attend¬ 
ance on Dr. Middleton, and Clara and De Craye were to be 
encouraged in sparkling together! And it happened that 
he particularly wished to shine. The admiration of his 
county made him believe he had a flavour in general society 
that was not yet distinguished by his bride, and he was 
to relinquish his opportunity in order to please Mrs. 
Mountstuart! Had she been in the pay of his rival she 
could not have stipulated for more. 

He remembered young Crossjay’s instant quietude, after 
struggling in his grasp, when Clara laid her hand on the 
boy: and from that infinitesimal circumstance he deduced 
the boy’s perception of a differing between himself and his 
bride, and a transfer of Cross jay’s allegiance from him to 
her. She shone; she had the gift of female beauty; the 
boy was attracted to it. That boy must be made to feel his 
treason. But the point of the cogitation was, that similarly 
were Clara to see her affianced shining, as shine he could 
when lit up by admirers, there was the probability that 
the sensation of her littleness would animate her to take 
aim at him once more. And then was the time for her 
chastisement. 

A visit to Dr. Middleton in the library satisfied him that 
she had not been renewing her entreaties to leave Pat- 
terne. Ho, the miserable coquette had now her pastime 
and was content to stay. Deceit was in the air: he heard 
the sound of the shuttle of deceit without seeing it; but 
on the whole, mindful of what he had dreaded during the 
hours of her absence, he was rather flattered, witheringly 
flattered. What was it that he had dreaded ? Nothing 
less than news of her running away. Indeed a silly fancy, 
a lover’s fancy! yet it had led him so far as to suspect, 
after parting with De Craye in the rain, that his friend 
and his bride were in collusion, and that he should not 


296 


THE EGOIST 


see them again. He had actually shouted on the rainy 
road the theatric call “ Fooled!” one of the stage-cries 
which are cries of nature! particularly the cry of nature 
with men who have driven other men to the cry. 

Constantia Durham had taught him to believe women 
capable of explosions of treason at half a minute’s notice. 
And strangely, to prove that women are all of a pack, she 
had worn exactly the same placidity of countenance just 
before she fled, as Clara yesterday and to-day; no nervous¬ 
ness, no flushes, no twitches of the brows, but smoothness, 
ease of manner — an elegant sisterliness, one might almost 
say: as if the creature had found a midway and border¬ 
line to walk on between cruelty and kindness, and between 
repulsion and attraction; so that up to the verge of her 
breath she did forcefully attract, repelling at one foot’s 
length with her armour of chill serenity. Not with any 
disdain, with no passion: such a line as she herself pur¬ 
sued she indicated to him on a neighbouring parallel. 
The passion in her was like a place of waves evaporated to 
a crust of salt. Clara’s resemblance to Constantia in this 
instance was ominous. For him whose tragic privilege it 
had been to fold each of them in his arms, and weigh on 
their eyelids, and see the dissolving mist-deeps in their 
eyes, it was horrible. Once more the comparison overcame 
him. Constantia he could condemn for revealing too much 
to his manly sight: she had met him almost half way: well, 
that was complimentary and sanguine: but her frankness 
was a baldness often rendering it doubtful which of the 
two, lady or gentleman, was the object of the chase — an 
extreme perplexity to his manly soul. Now Clara’s inner 
spirit was shyer, shy as a doe down those rose-tinged 
abysses; she allured both the lover and the hunter; forests 
of heavenliness were in her flitting eyes. Here the differ¬ 
ence of these fair women made his present fate an intoler¬ 
able anguish. For if Constantia was like certain of the 
ladies whom he had rendered unhappy, triumphed over, 
as it is queerly called, Clara was not. Her individuality 
as a woman was a thing he had to bow to. It was impos¬ 
sible to roll her up in the sex and bestow a kick on the 
travelling bundle. Hence he loved her, though she hurt 
him. Hence his wretchedness, and but for the hearty 


SIR 'WILLOUGHBY RECEIVES INSTRUCTION 297 


sincerity of his faith in the Self he loved likewise and 
more, he would have been hangdog abject. 

As for De Craye, Willoughby recollected his own ex¬ 
ploits too proudly to put his trust in a man. That fatal 
conjunction of temper and policy had utterly thrown him 
off his guard, or he would not have trusted the fellow 
even in the first hour of his acquaintance with Clara. But 
he had wished her to be amused while he wove his plans 
to retain her at the Hall: — partly imagining that she 
would weary of his neglect: vile delusion! In truth he 
should have given festivities, he should have been the sun 
of a circle, and have revealed himself to her in his more 
dazzling form. He went near to calling himself foolish 
after the tremendous reverberation of “Fooled! ” had 
ceased to shake him. 

How behave ? It slapped the poor gentleman’s pride in 
the face to ask. A private talk with her would rouse her 
to renew her supplications. He saw them flickering be¬ 
hind the girl’s transparent calmness. That calmness really 
drew its dead ivory hue from the suppression of them: 
something as much he guessed; and he was not sure either 
of his temper or his policy if he should hear her repeat 
her profane request. 

An impulse to address himself to Vernon and discourse 
with him jocularly on the childish whim of a young lady, 
moved perhaps by some whiff of jealousy, to shun the yoke, 
was checked. He had always taken so superior a pose 
with Vernon that he could not abandon it for a moment: 
on such a subject too! Besides Vernon was one of your 
men who entertain the ideas about women of fellows that 
have never conquered one: or only one, we will say in his 
case, knowing his secret history; and that one no flag to 
boast of. Densely ignorant of the sex, his nincompoopisb 
idealizations, at other times preposterous, would now be 
annoying. He would probably presume on Clara’s incon¬ 
ceivable lapse of dignity to read his master a lecture: 
he was quite equal to a philippic upon woman’s rights. 
This man had not been afraid to say that he talked common 
sense to women. He was an example of the consequence! 

Another result was, that Vernon did not talk sense to 
men. Willoughby’s wrath at Clara’s exposure of him to 


298 


THE EGOIST 


his cousin dismissed the proposal of a colloquy so likely 
to sting his temper, and so certain to diminish his lofti¬ 
ness. Unwilling to speak to anybody, he was isolated, 
yet consciously begirt by the mysterious action going on 
all over the house, from Clara and De Craye to Laetitia 
and young Crossjay, down to Barclay the maid. His 
blind sensitiveness felt as we may suppose a spider to feel 
when plucked from his own web and set in the centre of 
another’s. Lsetitia looked her share in the mystery. A 
burden was on her eyelashes. How she could have come 
to any suspicion of the circumstances, he was unable to 
imagine. Her intense personal sj^mpathy, it might be: 
he thought so with some gentle pity for her — of the 
paternal pat-back order of pity. She adored him, by 
decree of Venus; and the Goddess had not decreed that 
he should find consolation in adoring her. Nor could the 
temptings of prudent counsel in his head induce him to 
run the risk of such a total turnover as the incurring of 
Ljetitia’s pity of himself by confiding in her. He checked 
that impulse also, and more sovereignly. For him to be 
pitied by Laetitia seemed an upsetting of the scheme of 
Providence. Providence, otherwise the discriminating 
dispensation of the good things of life, had made him the 
beacon, her the bird: she was really the last person to 
whom he could unbosom. The idea of his being in a 
position that suggested his doing so, thrilled him with fits 
of rage; and it appalled him. There appeared to be 
another Power. The same which had humiliated him 
once was menacing him anew. For it could not be Provi¬ 
dence, whose favourite he had ever been. We must have 
a couple of Powers to account for discomfort when Egoism 
is the kernel of our religion. Benevolence had singled him 
for uncommon benefits: malignancy was at work to rob 
him of them. And you think well of the world, do you! 

Of necessity he associated Clara with the darker Power 
pointing the knife at the quick of his pride. Still, he 
would have raised her weeping: he would have stanched 
her wounds bleeding: he had an infinite thirst for her 
misery, that he might ease his heart of its charitable love. 
Or let her commit herself, and be cast off! Only she must 
commit herself glaringly, and be cast off by the world as 


SIR WILLOUGHBY RECEIVES INSTRUCTION 299 


well. Contemplating her in the form of a discarded weed, 
he had a catch of the breath: she was fair. He implored 
his Power that Horace De Craye might not be the man! 
Why any man? An illness, fever, fire, runaway horses, 
personal disfigurement, a laming, were sufficient. And 
then a formal and noble offer on his part to keep to the 
engagement with the unhappy wreck: yes, and to lead the 
limping thing to the altar, if she insisted. His imagina¬ 
tion conceived it, and the world’s applause besides. 

Nausea, together with a sense of duty to his line, extin¬ 
guished that loathsome prospect of a mate, though without 
obscuring his chivalrous devotion to his gentleman’s word 
of honour, which remained’ in his mind to compliment him 
permanently. 

On the whole, he could reasonably hope to subdue her to 
admiration. He drank a glass of champagne at his dress¬ 
ing; an unaccustomed act, but, as he remarked casually 
to his man Pollington, for whom the rest of the bottle was 
left, he had taken no horse-exercise that day. 

Having to speak to Vernon on business, he went to the 
schoolroom, where he discovered Clara, beautiful in full 
evening attire, with her arm on young Crossjay’s shoulder, 
and heard that the hard taskmaker had abjured Mrs. 
Mountstuart’s party, and had already excused himself, 
intending to keep Cross jay to the grindstone. Willoughby 
was for the boy, as usual, and more sparklingly than usual. 
Clara looked at him in some surprise. He rallied Vernon 
with great zest, quite silencing him when he said: “I bear 
witness that the fellow was here at his regular hour for 
lessons, and were you ? ” He laid his hand on Crossjay, 
touching Clara’s hand. 

“You will remember what I told you, Crossjay,” said 
she, rising from the seat gracefully. “ It is my command.” 

Crossjay frowned and puffed. 

“But only if I’m questioned,” he said. 

“Certainly,” she replied. 

“Then I question the rascal,” said Willoughby, caus¬ 
ing a start. “ What, sir, is your opinion of Miss Middle- 
ton in her robe of state this evening ?” 

“Now, the truth, Crossjay!” Clara held up a finger; 
and the boy could see she was playing at archness, but for 


300 


THE EGOIST 


Willoughby it was earnest. “The truth is not likely to 
offend you or me either, ” he murmured to her. 

“I wish him never, never, on any excuse, to speak any¬ 
thing else.” 

“I always did think her a Beauty,” Crossjay growled. 
He hated the having to say it. 

“There!” exclaimed Sir Willoughby, and bent extend" 
ing an arm to her. “ You have not suffered from the truth, 
my Clara! ” 

Her answer was: “ I was thinking how he might suffer 
if he were taught to tell the reverse.” 

“ Oh! for a fair lady! ” 

“That is the worst of teaching, Willoughby.” 

“We’ll leave it to the fellow’s instinct; he has our 
blood in him. I could convince you, though, if I might 
cite circumstances. Yes! But yes! And yes again! 
The entire truth cannot invariably be told. I venture to 
say it should not.” 

“You would pardon it for the ‘ fair lady ’ ?” 

“Applaud, my love.” 

He squeezed the hand within his arm, contemplating 
her. 

She was arrayed in a voluminous robe of pale blue silk 
vapourous with trimmings of light gauze of the same hue, 
gaze de Chambery, matching her fair hair and clear skin 
for the complete overthrow of less inflammable men than 
Willoughby. 

“ Clara! ” sighed he. 

“If so, it would really be generous,” she said, “though 
the teaching is bad.” 

“I fancy I can be generous.” 

“ Do we ever know ? ” 

He turned his head to Vernon, issuing brief succinct in¬ 
structions for letters to be written, and drew her into the 
hall, saying: “ Know ? There are people who do not know 
themselves, and as they are the majority they manufacture 
the axioms. And it is assumed that we have to swallow 
them. I may observe that I think I know. I decline to 
be engulphed in those majorities. ‘ Among them, but not 
of them.’ I know this, that my aim in life is to be 
generous.” 


SLR WILLOUGHBY RECEIVES INSTRUCTION 301 


“ Is it not an impulse or disposition rather than an aim ?” 

“So much I know,” pursued Willoughby, refusing to be 
tripped. But she rang discordantly in his ear. His 
“fancy that he could be generous,” and his “aim at being 
generous,” had met with no response. “I have given 
proofs,” he said briefly, to drop a subject upon which he 
was not permitted to dilate; and he murmured: “People 
acquainted with me! ...” She was asked if she expected 
him to boast of generous deeds. “From childhood!” she 
heard him mutter; and she said to herself: “ Release me, 
and you shall be everything! ” 

The unhappy gentleman ached as he talked: for with 
men and with hosts of women to whom he was indifferent, 
never did he converse in this shambling, third-rate, sheep¬ 
ish manner, devoid of all highness of tone and the proper 
precision of an authority. He was unable to fathom the 
cause of it, but Clara imposed it on him, and only in anger 
could he throw it off. The temptation to an outburst that 
would flatter him with the sound of his authoritative 
voice had to be resisted on a night when he must be com¬ 
posed if he intended to shine, so he merely mentioned 
Lady Busshe’s present, to gratify spleen by preparing the 
ground for dissension, and prudently acquiesced in her 
anticipated slipperiness. She would rather not look at it 
now, she said. 

“Not now; very well,” said he. 

His immediate deference made her regretful. “There 
is hardly time, Willoughby.” 

“My dear, we shall have to express our thanks to her.” 

“I cannot.” 

His arm contracted sharply. He was obliged to be 
silent. 

Dr. Middleton, Laetitia and the ladies Eleanor and Isabel 
joining them in the hall found two figures linked together 
in a shadowy indication of halves that have fallen apart 
and hang on the last thread of junction. Willoughby 
retained her hand on his arm; he held to it as the symbol 
of their alliance, and oppressed the girl's nerves by con¬ 
tact with a frame labouring for breath. De Craye looked 
on them from overhead. The carriages were at the door, 
and WiPoughby said: “ Where ’s Horace ? I suppose he’s 


302 


THE EGOIST 


taking a final shot at his Book of Anecdotes and neat 
collection of Irishisms.” 

“ No, ” replied the colonel, descending. “ That’s a spring 
works of itself and has discovered the secret of continuous 
motion, more ’s the pity! — unless you ’ll be pleased to 
make it of use to Science.” 

He gave a laugh of good humour. 

“ Your laughter, Horace, is a capital comment on your 
wit.” 

Willoughby said it with the air of one who has flicked a 
whip. 

“’Tis a genial advertisement of a vacancy,” said De 
Craye. 

“ Precisely: three parts auctioneer to one for the 
property.” 

“ Oh ! if you have a musical quack, score it a point in his 
favour, Willoughby, though you don’t swallow his drug.” 

“If he means to be musical, let him keep time.” 

“ Am I late ? ” said De Craye to the ladies, proving him¬ 
self an adept in the art of being gracefully vanquished and 
so winning tender hearts. 

Willoughby had refreshed himself. At the back of his 
mind there was a suspicion that his adversary would not 
have yielded so flatly without an assurance of practically 
triumphing, secretly getting the better of him; and it 
filled him with venom for a further bout at the next oppor¬ 
tunity : but as he had been sarcastic and mordant, he had 
shown Clara what he could do in a way of speaking differ¬ 
ent from the lamentable cooing stuff, gasps and feeble 
protestations to which, he knew not how, she reduced him. 
Sharing the opinion of his race, that blunt personalities, 
or the pugilistic form, administered directly on the salient 
features, are exhibitions of mastery in such encounters, 
he felt strong and solid, eager for the successes of the 
evening. De Craye was in the first carriage as escort to 
the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. Willoughby, with Clara, 
Lgetitia and Dr. Middleton followed, all silent, for the 
Rev. Doctor was ostensibly pondering; and Willoughby 
was damped a little when he unlocked his mouth to say: 

“ And yet I have not observed that Colonel De Craye is 
anything of a Celtiberian Egnatius meriting fustigation 


SIR WILLOUGHBY RECEIVES INSTRUCTION 303 


for an untimely display of well-whitened teeth, sir: 
‘ quicquid est, ubicunque est, quodcunque agit, renidet:’ 
— ha ? a morbus neither charming nor urbane to the gen¬ 
eral eye, however consolatory to the actor. But this gen¬ 
tleman does not offend so, or I am so strangely prepos¬ 
sessed in his favour as to be an incompetent witness.” 

Dr. Middleton’s persistent ha? eh? upon an honest 
frown of inquiry plucked an answer out of Willoughby 
that was meant to be humourously scornful and soon 
became apologetic under- the Doctor’s interrogatively 
grasping gaze. 

“These Irishmen,” Willoughby said, “will play the 
professional jester, as if it were an office they were born 
to. We must play critic now and then, otherwise we 
should have them deluging us with their Joe Millerisms.” 

“With their O’Millerisms you would say, perhaps ?” 

Willoughby did his duty to the joke, but the Rev. 
Doctor, though he wore the paternal smile of a man that 
has begotten hilarity, was not perfectly propitiated, and 
pursued: “Nor to my apprehension is ‘ the man’s laugh the 
comment on his wit ’ unchallengeably new: instances of 
cousinship germane to the phrase will recur to you. But 
it has to be noted that it was a phrase of assault; it was 
ostentatiously battery: and I would venture to remind 
you, friend, that among the elect, considering that it is 
as fatally facile to spring the laugh upon a man as to 
deprive him of his life, considering that we have only to 
condescend to the weapon, and that the more popular 
necessarily the more murderous that weapon is, — among 
the elect, to which it is your distinction to aspire to be¬ 
long, the rule holds to abstain from any employment of 
the obvious, the percoct, and likewise, for your own sake, 
from the epitonic, the overstrained; for if the former, by 
readily assimilating with the understandings of your 
audience are empowered to commit assassination on your 
victim, the latter come under the charge of unseemliness, 
inasmuch as they are a description of public suicide. 
Assuming, then, manslaughter to bo your pastime, and 
hari-kari not to be your bent, the phrase, to escape crimi¬ 
nality, must rise in you as you would have it to fall on 
him, ex improviso. Am I right ? ” 


304 


THE EGOIST 


“ I am in the habit of thinking it impossible, sir, that 
you can be in error,” said Willoughby. 

Dr. Middleton left it the more emphatic by saying 
nothing further. 

Both his daughter and Miss Dale, who had disapproved 
the waspish snap at Colonel De Craye, were in wonder¬ 
ment of the art of speech which could so soothingly inform 
a gentleman that his behaviour had not been gentlemanly. 

Willoughby was damped by what he comprehended of it 
for a few minutes. In proportion as he realized an evening 
with his ancient admirers he was restored, and he began 
to marvel greatly at his folly in not giving banquets and 
Balls, instead of making a solitude about himself and his 
bride. For solitude, thought he, is good for the man, the 
man being a creature consumed by passion; woman’s love, 
on the contrary, will only be nourished by the reflex light 
she catches of you in the eyes of others, she having no 
passion of her own, but simply an instinct driving her to 
attach herself to whatsoever is most largely admired, most 
shining. So thinking, he determined to change his course 
of conduct, and he was happier. In the first gush of our 
wisdom drawn directly from experience, there is a mental 
intoxication that cancels the old world and establishes a 
new one, not allowing us to ask whether it is too late. 


CHAPTER XXX 

TREATING OF THE DINNER-PARTY AT MRS. MOUNT8TUART 

jenkinson’s 

Vernon and young Crossjay had tolerably steady work 
together for a couple of hours, varied by the arrival of a 
plate of meat on a tray for the master, and some interro 
gations put to him from time to time by the boy in refer¬ 
ence to Miss Middleton. Crossjay made the discovery 
that if he abstained from alluding to Miss Middleton’s 
beauty he might water his dusty path with her name 
nearly as much as he liked. Mention of her beauty in 



MRS. MOUNTSTUART’s DINNER-PARTY £05 

curred a reprimand. On the first occasion his master was 
wistful. “Isn’t she glorious!” Cross jay fancied he had 
started a sovereign receipt for blessed deviations. He 
tried it again, but psedagogue-thunder broke over his 
head. 

“Yes, only I can’t understand what she means, Mr. 
Whitford,” he excused himself. “ First, I was not to tell; 
I know I was n’t, because she said so; she quite as good as 
said so. Her last words were, ‘ Mind, Crossjay, you know 
nothing about me,’ when I stuck to that beast of a tramp, 
who’s a ‘ walking moral,’ and gets money out of people by 
snuffling it.” 

“ Attend to your lesson, or you ’ll be one,” said Vernon. 

“ Yes, but, Mr. Whitford, now I am to tell. I’m to 
answer straight out to every question.” 

“ Miss Middleton is anxious that you should be truthful.” 

“Yes, but in the morning she told me not to tell.” 

“ She was in a hurry. She has it on her conscience that 
you may have misunderstood her, and she wishes you never 
to be guilty of an untruth, least of all on her account.” 

Cross jay committed an unspoken resolution to the air in 
a violent sigh: “ Ah! ” and said: “ If I were sure! ” 

“ Do as she bids you, my boy.” 

“ But I don’t know what it is she wants.” 

“ Hold to her last words to you.” 

“So I do. If she told me to run till I dropped, on 
I’d go.” 

“She told you to study your lessons : do that.” 

Cross jay buckled to his book, invigorated by an imagina¬ 
tion of his liege lady on the page. 

After a studious interval, until the impression of his lady 
had subsided, he resumed: “She’s so funny! She’s just 
like a girl, and then she’s a lady too. She’s my idea of 
a princess. And Colonel De Craye! Was n’t he taught 
dancing! When he says something funny he ducks, and 
seems to be setting to his partner. I should like to be 
as clever as her father. That is a clever man ! I daresay 
Colonel De Craye will dance with her to-night. I wish I 
wa£ there.” 

“ It’s a dinner-party, not a dance,” Vernon forced himself 
to say, to dispel that ugly vision. 


806 


THE EGOIST 


“ Is n’t it, sir? I thought they danced after dinner¬ 
parties. Mr. Whitford, have you ever seen her run ? ” 

Vernon pointed him to his task. 

They were silent for a lengthened period. 

“ But does Miss Middleton mean me to speak out if Sir 
Willoughby asks me?” said Crossjay. 

“ Certainly. You need n’t make much of it. All’s plain 
and simple.” 

“ But I ’m positive, Mr. Whitford, he was n’t to hear of 
her going to the post-office with me before breakfast. And 
how did Colonel De Craye find her and bring her back, with 
that old Flitch ? He’s a man and can go where he pleases, 
and I’d have found her too, give me the chance. You know, 
I’m fond of Miss Dale, but she — I’m very fond of her — 
but you can’t think she’s a girl as well. And about Miss 
Dale, when she says a thing, there it is, clear. But Miss 
Middleton has a lot of meanings. Never mind; I goby 
what’s inside, and I’m pretty sure to please her.” 

“Take your chin off your hand and your elbow off the 
book, and fix yourself,” said Vernon, wrestling with the 
seduction of Crossjay’s idolatry, for Miss Middleton’s ap¬ 
pearance had been preternaturally sweet on her departure, 
and the next pleasure to seeing her was hearing of her 
from the lips of this passionate young poet. 

“Bemember that you please her by speaking truth,” 
Vernon added, and laid himself open to questions upon 
the truth, by which he learnt, with a perplexed sense of 
envy and sympathy, that the boy’s idea of truth strongly 
approximated to his conception of what should be agreeable 
to Miss Middleton. 

He was lonely, bereft of the bard, when he had tucked 
Cross jay up in his bed and left him. Books he could not 
read; thoughts were disturbing, A seat in the library and 
a stupid stare helped to pass the hours, and but for the spot 
of sadness moving meditation in spite of his effort to stun 
himself, lie would have borne a happy resemblance to an 
idiot in the sun. He had verily no command of his reason. 
She was too beautiful! Whatever she did was best. That 
was the refrain of the fountain-song in him; the burden 
being her whims, variations, inconsistencies, wiles; her 
tremblings between good and naughty, that might be 


MRS. MOUNTSTUART’S DINNER-PARTY 307 


stamped to noble or to terrible; her sincereness, her dupli* 
city, her courage, cowardice, possibilities for heroism and 
for treachery. By dint of dwelling on the theme, he mag* 
nified the young lady to extraordinary stature. And he 
had sense enough to own that her character was yet liquid 
in the mould, and that she was a creature of only naturally 
youthful wildness provoked to freakishness by the ordeal 
of a situation shrewd as any that can happen to her sex 
in civilized life. But he was compelled to think of her 
extravagantly, and he leaned a little to the discrediting of 
her, because her actual image unmanned him and was un¬ 
bearable : and to say at the end of it “ She is too beautiful! 
whatever she does is best,” smoothed away the wrong he 
did her. Had it been in his power he would have thought 
of her in the abstract — the stage contiguous to that which 
he adopted: but the attempt was luckless; the Stagyrite 
would have failed in it. What philosopher could have set 
down that face of sun and breeze and nymph in shadow as 
a point in a problem ? 

The library-door was opened at midnight by Miss Dale. 
She closed it quietly. “ You are not working, Mr. Whitford ? 
I fancied you would wish to hear of the evening. Professor 
Crooklyn arrived after all! Mrs. Mountstuart is bewildered: 
she says she expected you, and that you did not excuse your¬ 
self to her, and she cannot comprehend, et csetera. That is 
to say, she chooses bewilderment to indulge in the exclama¬ 
tory. She must be very much annoyed. The professor did 
come by the train she drove to meet! ” 

“ I thought it probable,” said Vernon. 

“ He had to remain a couple of hours at the Bailway Inn : 
no conveyance was to be found for him. He thinks he has 
caught a cold, and cannot stifle his fretfulness about it. He 
may be as learned as Dr. Middleton; he has not the same 
happy constitution. Nothing more unfortunate could have 
occurred; he spoilt the party. Mrs. Mountstuart tried petting 
him, which drew attention to him and put us all in his key 
for several awkward minutes, more than once. She lost her 
head; she was unlike herself. I may be presumptuous in 
criticizing her, but should not the president of a dinner-tablf 
treat it like a battle-field, and let the guest that sinks descend, 
and not allow the voice of a discordant, however illustrious, 


308 


THE EGOIST 


to rule it ? Of course, it is when I see failures that I fancy 
I could manage so well: comparison is prudently reserved 
in the other cases. I am a daring critic, no doubt because 
I know I shall never be tried by experiment. I have no 
ambition to be tried.” 

She did not notice a smile of Vernon’s and continued: 
“Mrs. Mountstuart gave him the lead upon any subject he 
chose. I thought the Professor never would have ceased 
talking of a young lady who had been at the inn before him 
drinking hot brandy and water with a gentleman! ” 

“ How did he hear of that ? ” cried Vernon, roused by the 
malignity of the Fates. 

“ From the landlady, trying to comfort him. And a story 
of her lending shoes and stockings while those of the young 
.lady were drying. He has the dreadful snappish humourous 
way of recounting which impresses it ; the table took up the 
subject of this remarkable young lady, and whether she was 
a lady of the neighbourhood, and who she could be that went 
abroad on foot in heavy rain. It was painful to me; I knew 
enough to be sure of who she was.” 

“ Did she betray it ? ” 

“No.” 

“ Did Willoughby look at her ? ” 

“ Without suspicion then.” 

“Then?” 

“Colonel De Craye was diverting us, and he was very 
amusing. Mrs. Mountstuart told him afterwards that he 
ought to be paid salvage for saving the wreck of her party. 
Sir Willoughby was a little too cynical: he talked well; 
what he said was good, but it was not good-humoured: he 
has not the reckless indifference of Colonel De Craye to 
uttering nonsense that amusement may come of it. And in 
the drawing-room he lost such gaiety as he had. I was close 
to Mrs. Mountstuart when Professor Crooklyn approached 
her and spoke in my hearing of that gentleman and that 
young lady. They were, you could see by his nods, Colonel 
De Craye and Miss Middleton.” 

“ And she at once mentioned it to Willoughby! ” 

“ Colonel De Craye gave her no chance, if she sought it. 
He courted her profusely. Behind his rattle he must have 
brains. It ran in all directions to entertain her and her 
circle.” 


MRS. MOUNTSTUART’s DINNER-PARTY 


302 


“ Willougliby knows nothing ? ” 

“ I cannot judge. He stood with Mrs. Mountstuart a 
minute as we were taking leave. She looked strange. I 
heard her say, ‘ The rogue.’ He laughed. She lifted her 
shoulders. He scarcely opened his mouth on the way 
home.” 

“ The thing must run its course,” Vernon said, with the 
philosophical air which is desperation rendered decorous. 
“ Willoughby deserves it. A man of full growth ought to 
know that nothing on earth tempts Providence so much as 
the binding of a young woman against her will. Those two 
are mutually attracted : they ’re both . . . They meet and 
the mischief’s done: both are bright. He can persuade 
with a word. Another might discourse like an angel and 
it would be useless. I said everything I could think of, to 
no purpose. And so it is: there are those attractions ! — 
just as, with her, Willoughby is the reverse, he repels. 
I’m in about the same predicament — or should be if she 
were plighted to me. That is, for the length of five min¬ 
utes; about the space of time I should require for the 
formality of handing her back her freedom. How a sane 
man can imagine a girl like that . . . ! But if she has 
changed, she has changed ! You can’t conciliate a withered 
affection. This detaining her, and tricking, and not listen¬ 
ing, only increases her aversion; she learns the art in turn. 
Here she is, detained by fresh plots to keep Dr. Middle- 
ton at the Hall. That’s true, is it not ? ” He saw that it 
was. “ No, she’s not to blame! She has told him her 
mind; he won’t listen. The question then is, whether she 
keeps to her word, or breaks it. It’s a dispute between a 
conventional idea of obligation and an injury to her nature. 
Which is the more dishonourable thing to do ? Why, you 
and I see in a moment that her feelings guide her best. 
It’s one of the few cases ip which nature may be consulted 
like an oracle.” 

“ Is she so sure of her nature ? ” said Miss Dale. 

“You may doubt it; I do not. I am surprised &t her 
coming back. De Craye is a man of the world, and advised 
it, I suppose. He — well, I never had the persuasive 
tongue, and my failing does n’t count for much.” 

“ But the suddenness of the intimacy! ” 


310 


THE EGOIST 


“The disaster is rather famous ‘at first sight/ He 
came in a fortunate hour ... for him. A pigmy’s a giant 
if he can manage to arrive in season. Did you not notice 
that there was danger, at their second or third glance ? You 
counselled me to hang on here, where the amount of good I 
do in proportion to what I have to endure is microscopic.” 

“ It was against your wishes, I know,” said Laetitia, and 
when the words were out she feared that they were tentative. 
Her delicacy shrank from even seeming to sound him in 
relation to a situation so delicate as Miss Middleton’s. 

The same sentiment guarded him from betraying himself, 
and he said: “ Partly against. We both foresaw the pos¬ 
sible — because, like most prophets, we knew a little more of 
circumstances enabling us to see the fatal. A pigmy would 
have served, but De Craye is a handsome, intelligent, pleas¬ 
ant fellow.” 

“Sir Willoughby’s friend!” 

“ Well, in these affairs! A great deal must be charged 
on the Goddess.” 

“ That is really Pagan fatalism ! ” 

“ Our modern word for it is Nature. Science condescends 
to speak of natural selection. Look at these ! They are 
both graceful and winning and witty, bright to mind and 
eye, made for one another, as country people say. I can’t 
blame him. Besides we don’t know that he’s guilty. 
We ’re quite in the dark, except that we ’re certain how it 
must end. If the chance should occur to you of giving 
Willoughby a word of counsel — it may —you might, with¬ 
out irritating him as my knowledge of his plight does, hint 
at your eyes being open. His insane dread of a detective 
world makes him artificially blind. As soon as he fancies 
himself seen, he sets to work spinning a web, and he dis¬ 
cerns nothing else. It’s generally a clever kind of web; but 
if it’s a tangle to others it’s the same to him, and a veil as 
well. He is preparing the catastrophe, he forces the issue. 
Tell him of her extreme desire to depart. Treat her as mad, 
to soothe him. Otherwise one morning he will wake a 
second time . . . ! It is perfectly certain. And the second 
time it will be entirely his own fault. Inspire him with 
some philosophy.” 

“ I have none.” 


MRS. MOUNTSTUART’s DINNER-PARTY 311 

u If I thought so, I would say you have better. There 
are two kinds of philosophy, mine and yours. Mine comes 
of coldness, yours of devotion.” 

“ He is unlikely to choose me for his confidante.” 

Vernon meditated. “ One can never quite guess what he 
will do, from never knowing the heat of the centre in him 
which precipitates his actions : he has a great art of con¬ 
cealment. As to me, as you perceive, my views are too 
philosophical to let me be of use to any of them. I blame 
only the one who holds to the bond. The sooner I am 
gone ! — in fact, I cannot stay on. So Dr. Middleton and 
the Professor did not strike fire together ? ” 

“ Dr. Middleton was ready and pursued him, but Pro¬ 
fessor Crooklyn insisted on shivering. His line of blank 
verse : 1 A Railway platform and a Railway inn! ’ became 
pathetic in repetition. He must have suffered.” 

“ Somebody has to ! ” 

“ Why the innocent ? ” 

“ He arrives a propos. But remember that Fridolin some¬ 
times contrives to escape and have the guilty scorched. The 
Professor would not have suffered if he had missed his train, 
as he appears to be in the habit of doing. Thus his un¬ 
accustomed good fortune was the cause of his bad.” 

“ You saw him on the platform ? ” 

“ I am unacquainted with the Professor. I had to get Mrs. 
Mountstuart out of the way.” 

“ She says she described him to you. 1 Complexion of a 
sweetbread, consistency of a quenelle, grey, and like a Saint 
without his dish behind the head/ ” 

“ Her descriptions are strikingly accurate, but she forgot 
to sketch his back, and all that I saw was a narrow sloping 
back and a broad hat resting the brim on it. My report to 
her spoke of an old gentleman of dark complexion, as the 
only traveller on the platform. She has faith in the effi¬ 
ciency of her descriptive powers, and so she was willing to 
drive off immediately. — The intention was a start to Lon¬ 
don. Colonel De Craye came up and effeoted in five minutes 
what I could not compass in thirty.” 

“ But you saw Colonel De Craye pass you ?” 

“ My work was done; I should have been ail intruder. 
Besides I was acting wet jacket with Mrs. Mountstuart to 


812 


THE EGOIST 


get her to drive off fast, or she might have jumped out in 
search of her Professor herself.” 

“ She says you were lean as a fork, with the wind 
whistling through the prongs.” 

“ You see how easy it is to deceive one who is an artist in 
phrases. Avoid them, Miss Dale ; they dazzle the penetra¬ 
tion of the composer. That is why people of ability like Mrs. 
Mountstuart see so little; they are so bent on describing 
brilliantly. However, she is kind and charitable at heart. 
I have been considering to-night that, to cut this knot as it 
is now, Miss Middleton might do worse than speak straight 
out to Mrs. Mountstuart. No one else would have such 
influence with Willoughby. The simple fact of Mrs. Mount- 
stuart’s knowing of it would be almost enough. But courage 
would be required for that. Good night, Miss Dale.” 

“ Good night, Mr. Whitford. You pardon me for disturb¬ 
ing you ? ” 

Vernon pressed her hand reassuringly. He had but to 
look at her and review her history to think his cousin Wil¬ 
loughby punished by just retribution. Indeed for any mal¬ 
treatment of the dear boy Love by man or by woman, coming 
under your cognizance, you, if you be of common soundness, 
shall behold the retributive blow struck in your time. 

Miss Dale retired thinking how like she and Vernon were 
to one another in the toneless condition they had achieved 
through sorrow. He succeeded in masking himself from 
her, owing to her awe of the circumstances. She reproached 
herself for not having the same devotion to the cold idea of 
duty as he had; and though it provoked inquiry, she would 
not stop to ask why he had left Miss Middleton a prey to the 
sparkling colonel. It seemed a proof of the philosophy he 
preached. 

As she was passing by young Crossjay’s bedroom-door a 
face appeared. Sir Willoughby slowly emerged and pre¬ 
sented himself in his full length, beseeching her to banish 
alarm. 

He said it in a hushed voice, with a face qualified to create 
the sentiment. 

“ Are you tired ? sleepy ? ” said he. 

She nrotested that she was not; she intended to read fo/ 
an hour. 


SIR WILLOUGHBY ACHIEVES PATHOS 


313 


He begged to have the hoar dedicated to him. “ I shall 
be relieved by conversing with a friend.” 

No subterfuge crossed her mind; she thought his mid¬ 
night visit to the boy’s bed-side a pretty feature in him; 
she was full of pity too ; she yielded to the strange request, 
feeling that it did not become “ an old woman ” to attach 
importance even to the public discovery of midnight inter¬ 
views involving herself as one, and feeling also that she 
was being treated as an old friend in the form of a very old 
woman. Her mind was bent on arresting any recurrence to 
the project she had so frequently outlined in the tongue of 
innuendo, of which, because of her repeated tremblings 
under it, she thought him a master. 

He conducted her along the corridor to the private sitting- 
room of the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. 

“ Deceit! ” he said, while lighting the candles on the 
mantelpiece. 

She was earnestly compassionate, and a word that could 
not relate to her personal destinies refreshed her by dis¬ 
placing her apprehensive antagonism and giving pity free 
play. 


CHAPTER XXXI 

8IR WILLOUGHBY ATTEMPTS AND ACHIEVES PATHOS 

Both were seated. Apparently he would have preferred 
to watch her dark downcast eyelashes in silence under sanc¬ 
tion of his air of abstract meditation and the melancholy 
superinducing it. Blood-colour was in her cheeks ; the 
party had inspirited her features. Might it be that lively 
company, an absence of economical solicitudes and a flourish¬ 
ing home were all she required to make her bloom again ? 
The supposition was not hazardous in presence of her 
heightened complexion. 

She raised her eyes. He could not meet her look without 
speaking. 

“ Can you forgive deceit ? ” 



314 


THE EGOIST 


“ It would be to boast of more charity than I know my* 
self to possess, were I to say that I can, Sir Willoughby. I 
hope I am able to forgive. " I cannot tell. I should like to 
say yes.” 

“ Could you live with the deceiver ? ” 

“ No.” 

“ No. I could have given that answer for you. No sem¬ 
blance of union should be maintained between the deceiver 
and ourselves. Laetitia ! ” 

“ Sir Willoughby ? ” 

“ Have I no right to your name ? ” 

“ If it please you to . . .” 

“ I speak as my thoughts run, and they did not know a 
Miss Dale so well as a dear Laetitia: my truest friend! You 
have talked with Clara Middleton ? ” 

“ We had a conversation.” 

Her brevity affrighted him. He flew off in a cloud. 

“ Reverting to that ^question of deceivers : is it not your 
opinion that to pardon, to condone, is to corrupt society by 
passing off as pure what is false ? Do we not,” he wore the 
smile of haggard playfulness of a convalescent child the first 
day back to its toys, “ Laetitia, do we not impose a counter¬ 
feit on the currency ? ” 

“ Supposing it to be really deception.” 

“ Apart from my loathing of deception, of falseness in any 
shape, upon any grounds, I hold it an imperious duty to ex¬ 
pose, punish, off with it. I take it to be one of the forms of 
noxiousness which a good citizen is bound to extirpate. I 
am not myself good citizen enough, I confess, for much more 
than passive abhorrence. I do not forgive: I am at heart 
serious and I cannot forgive : — there is no possible recon¬ 
ciliation, there can be only an ostensible truce, between the 
two hostile powers dividing this world.” 

She glanced at him quickly. 

“ Good and evil! ” he said. 

Her face expressed a surprise relapsing on the heart. 

He spelt the puckers of her forehead to mean, that she 
feared he might be speaking unchristianly. 

“ You will find it so in all religions, my dear Laetitia: the 
Hindoo, the Persian, ours. It is universal; an experience 
of our humanity. Deceit and sincerity cannot live together. 


SIK WILLOUGHBY ACHIEVES PATHOS 


315 


Truth must kill the lie, or the lie will kill truth. I do not 
forgive. All I say to the person is, go ! ” 

“ But that is right! that is geuerous ! ” exclaimed Laetitia, 
glad to approve him for the sake of blinding her critical 
soul, and relieved by the idea of Clara’s difficulty solved. 

“ Capable of generosity perhaps,” he mused aloud. 

She wounded him by not supplying the expected enthusi¬ 
astic asseveration of her belief iu his general tendency to 
magnanimity. 

He said after a pause: “ But the world is not likely 

to be impressed by anything not immediately gratifying it. 
People change, I find: as we increase in years we cease to 
be the heroes we were! I myself am insensible to change : 
I do not admit the charge. Except in this, we will say: 
personal ambition. I have it no more. And what is it 
when we have it ? Decidedly a confession of inferiority ! 
That is, the desire to be distinguished is an acknowledge¬ 
ment of insufficiency. But I have still the craving for my 
dearest friends to think well of me. A weakness ? Call it 
so. Not a dishonourable weakness ! ” 

Laetitia racked her brain for the connection of his present 
speech with the preceding dialogue. She was baffled, from 
not knowing “ the heat of the centre in him ” as Vernon 
opaquely phrased it in charity to the object of her worship. 

“ Well,” said he, unappeased, “ and besides the passion to 
excel, I have changed somewhat in the heartiness of my 
thirst for the amusements incident to my station. I do not 
care to keep a stud — I was once tempted : nor hounds. And 
I can remember the day when I determined to have the 
best kennels and the best breed of horses in the kingdom. 
Puerile ! What is distinction of that sort, or of any acqui¬ 
sition and accomplishment ? We ask ! One’s self is not the 
greater. To seek it, owns to our smallness, in real fact; 
and when it is attained, what then ? My horses are good, 
they are admired, I challenge the county to surpass them: 
well ? These are but my horses; the praise is of the 
animals, not of me. I decline to share in it. Yet I know 
men content to swallow the praise of their beasts and be 
semi-equine. The littleness of one’s fellows in the mob of 
life is a very strange experience! One may regret to have 
lost the simplicity of one’s forefathers, which could accept 


316 


THE EGOIST 


those and other distinctions with a cordial pleasure, not tG 
say pride. As for instance, I am, as it is called, a dead shot. 
‘ Give your acclamations, gentlemen, to my ancestors, from 
whom I inherited a steady hand and quick sight.’ They do 
not touch me. Where I do not find myself — that I am 
essentially I — no applause can move me. To speak to you 
as I would speak to none, admiration — you know that in my 
early youth I swam in flattery — I had to swim to avoid 
drowning ! — admiration of my personal gifts has grown 
tasteless. Changed, therefore, inasmuch as there has been 
a growth of spirituality. We are all in submission to mortal 
laws, and so far I have indeed changed. I may add that it 
is unusual for country gentlemen to apply themselves to 
scientific researches. These are, however, in the spirit of 
the time. I apprehended that instinctively when at College. 
I forsook the classics for science. And thereby escaped the 
vice of domineering self-sufficiency peculiar to classical men, 
of which you had an amusing example in the carriage, on 
the way to Mrs. Mountstuart’s this evening. Science is 
modest; slow, if you like: it deals with facts, and having 
mastered them, it masters men; of necessity, not with a 
stupid loud-mouthed arrogance : words big and oddly-garbed 
as the Pope’s body-guard! Of course, one bows to the 
Infallible; we must, when his giant-mercenaries level 
bayonets! ” 

Sir Willoughby offered Miss Dale half a minute that she 
might in gentle feminine fashion acquiesce in the implied 
reproof of Dr. Middleton’s behaviour to him during the 
drive to Mrs. Mountstuart’s. She did not. 

Her heart was accusing Clara of having done it a wrong 
and a hurt. For while he talked he seemed to her to justify 
Clara’s feelings and her conduct: and her own reawakened 
sensations of injury came to the surface a moment to look at 
him, affirming that they pardoned him, and pitied, but 
hardly wondered. 

The heat of the centre in him had administered the com¬ 
fort he wanted, though the conclusive accordant notes he 
loved on woman’s lips, that subservient harmony of another 
instrument desired of musicians when they have done their 
solo-playing, came not to wind up the performance : not a 
single bar. She did not speak. Probably his Lsefcitia was 


SIR WILLOUGHBY ACHIEVES PATHOS 


317 


overcome, as he had long known her to be when they con* 
versed ; nerve-subdued, unable to deploy her mental resources 
or her musical. Yet ordinarily she had command of the 
latter. — Was she too condoling ? Did a reason exist for 
it ? Had the impulsive and desperate girl spoken out to 
Laetitia to the fullest ? — shameless daughter of a domineer¬ 
ing sire that she was ! Ghastlier inquiry (it struck the 
centre of him with a sounding ring), was Laetitia pitying 
him overmuch for worse than the pain of a little difference 
Detween lovers — for treason on the part of his bride ? Did 
she know of a rival ? know more than he ? 

When the centre of him was violently struck he was a 
genius in penetration. He guessed that she did know : and 
by this was he presently helped to achieve pathos. 

“ So my election was for Science,” he continued: “ and if 
it makes me, as I fear, a rara avis among country gentlemen, 
it unites me, puts me in the main, I may say, in the only 
current of progress — a word sufficiently despicable in their 
political jargon.—You enjoyed your evening at Mrs. 
Mountstuart’s ? ” 

“ Very greatly.” 

“ She brings her Professor to dine here the day after to¬ 
morrow. Does it astonish you ? You started.” 

“ I did not hear the invitation.” 

“It was arranged at the table : you and I were separated 
— cruelly, I told her: she declared that we see enough of 
one another, and that it was good for me that we should be 
separated; neither of which is true. I may not have 
known what is the best for me : I do know what is good. If 
in my younger days I egregiously erred, that, taken of itself 
alone, is, assuming me to have sense and feeling, the surer 
proof of present wisdom. I can testify in person that wis¬ 
dom is pain. If pain is to add to wisdom, let me suffer! 
Do you approve of that, Laetitia ? ” 

“ It is well said.” 

“ It is felt. Those who themselves have suffered should 
know the benefit of the resolution.” 

“ One may have suffered so much as to wish only for 
peace.” 

“ True : but you! have you ? ” 

“ It would be for peace, if I prayed for an earthly gift,” 


318 


THE EGOIST 


Sir Willoughby dropped a smile on her. "I mentioned 
the Pope’s parti-coloured body-guard just now. In my 
youth their singular attire impressed me. People tell me 
they have been re-uniformed: I am sorry. They remain 
one of my liveliest recollections of the Eternal City. They 
affected my sense of humour, always alert in me, as you are 
aware. We English have humour. It is the first thing 
struck in us when we land on the Continent: our risible 
faculties are generally active all through the tour. Humour, 
or the clash of sense with novel examples of the absurd, is 
our characteristic. I do not condescend to boisterous dis¬ 
plays of it. I observe, and note the people’s comicalities 
for my correspondence. But you have read my letters — 
most of them, if not all ? ” 

“ Many of them.” 

“I was with you then! — I was about to say — that 
Swiss-guard reminded me —you have not been in Italy. I 
have constantly regretted it. You are the very woman, 
you have the soul for Italy. I know no other of whom I 
could say it, with whom I should not feel that she was out 
of place, discordant with me. Italy and Laetitia! often 
have I joined you together. We shall see. I begin to 
have hopes. Here you have literally stagnated. Why, a 
dinner-party refreshes you! What would not travel do, 
and that heavenly climate! You are a reader of history 
and poetry. Well, poetry! I never yet saw the poetry 
that expressed the tenth part of what I feel in the pres¬ 
ence of beauty and magnificence, and when I really medi¬ 
tate — profoundly. Call me a positive mind. I feel: only 
I feel too intensely for poetry. By the nature of it, poetry 
cannot be sincere. I will have sincerity. Whatever 
touches our emotions should be spontaneous, not a craft. 
I know you are in favour of poetry. You would win me, if 
any one could. But history ! there I am with you. Walk¬ 
ing over ruins: at night: the arches of the solemn black 
amphitheatre pouring moonlight on us — the moonlight of 
Italy! ” 

“ You would not laugh there, Sir Willoughby ? ” said 
Laetitia, rousing herself from a stupor of apprehensive 
amazement, to utter something and realize actual circum¬ 
stances. 


SIR WILLOUGHBY ACHIEVED PATHOS 


319 


“Besides, you, I think, or I am mistaken in you — ” he 
deviated from his projected speech — “ you are not a victim 
of the sense of association, and the ludicrous.” 

“ I can understand the influence of it: I have at least a 
conception of the humourous: but ridicule would not strike 
me in the Coliseum of Rome. I could not bear it, no, Sir 
Willoughby! ” 

She appeared to be taking him in very strong earnest, 
by thus petitioning him not to laugh in the Coliseum, and 
now he said: “ Besides, you are one who could accommo¬ 
date yourself to the society of the ladies, my aunts. Good 
women, Laetitia! I cannot imagine them de trop in Italy, 
or in a household. I have of course reason to be partial in 
my judgement.” 

“They are excellent and most amiable ladies; I love 
them,” said Laetitia fervently ; the more strongly excited to 
fervour by her enlightenment as to his drift. 

She read it, that he designed to take her to Italy with the 
ladies ; — after giving Miss Middleton her liberty; that was 
necessarily implied. And that was truly generous. In his 
boyhood he had been famous for his bountifulness in scatter¬ 
ing silver and gold. Might he not have caused himself to 
be misperused in later life? 

Clara had spoken to her of the visit and mission of the 
ladies to the library: and Laetitia daringly conceived her¬ 
self to be on the certain track of his meaning, she being able 
to enjoy their society as she supposed him to consider that 
Miss Middleton did not, and would not either abroad or at 
home. 

Sir Willoughby asked her: “ You could travel with 
them ? ” 

“ Indeed I could! ” 

“ Honestly ? ” 

“ As affirmatively as one may protest. Delightedly.” 

“ Agreed. It is an undertaking.” He put his hand out. 
“ Whether I be of the party or not! To Italy, Laetitia! It 
would give me pleasure to be with you, and it will, if I must 
be excluded, to think of you in Italy! ” 

His hand was out. She had to feign inattention or yield 
her own. She had not the effrontery to pretend not to see, 
and she yielded it. He pressed it, and whenever it shrank 


320 


THE EGOIST 


a quarter-inch to withdraw, he shook it up and down, as an 
instrument that had been lent him for due emphasis to his 
remarks. And very emphatic an amorous orator can make 
it upon a captive lady. 

“I am unable to speak decisively on that or any subject. 
I am, I think you once quoted, ‘ tossed like a weed on the 
ocean/ Of myself I can speak: I cannot speak for a second 
person. I am infinitely harassed. If I could cry, ‘ To Italy 
to-morrow ! 7 Ah ! . . . Do not set me down for complain¬ 
ing. I know the lot of man. But, Laetitia, deceit! deceit! 
It is a bad taste in the mouth. It sickens us of humanity. 
I compare it to an earthquake: we lose all our reliance on 
the solidity of the world. It is a betrayal not simply of the 
person; it is a betrayal of humankind. My friend ! Con¬ 
stant friend! No, I will not despair. Yes, I have faults; 
I will remember them. Only, forgiveness is another ques¬ 
tion. Yes, the injury I can forgive : the falseness never. In 
the interests of humanity, no! So young, and such deceit! ” 

Laetitia’s bosom rose: her hand was detained: a lady who 
has yielded it cannot wrestle to have it back: those out¬ 
works which protect her, treacherously shelter the enemy 
aiming at the citadel when he has taken them. In return 
for the silken armour bestowed on her by our civilization, 
it is exacted that she be soft and civil nigh up to perishing- 
point. She breathed tremulously high, saying on her top- 
breath: “If it—it may not be so; it can scarcely . . .” 
A deep sigh intervened. It saddened her that she knew so 
much. 

“ For when I love, I love,” said Sir Willoughby; “ my 
friends and my servants know that. There can be no me¬ 
dium : not with me. I give all, I claim all. As I am 
absorbed, so must I absorb. We both cancel and create, we 
extinguish and we illumine one another. The error may be 
in the choice of an object: it is not in the passion. Perfect 
confidence, perfect abandonment. I repeat, I claim it be¬ 
cause I give it. The selfishness of love may be denounced : 
it is a part of us! My answer would be, it is an element 
only of the noblest of us! Love, Lsetitia ! I speak of love. 
But one who breaks faith to drag us through the mire, who 
betrays, betrays and hands us over to the world, whose prey 
we become identically because of virtues we were educated 


SIR WILLOUGHBY ACHIEVES PATHOS 321 


to tliink it a blessing to possess : tell me the name for that! 

— Again: it has ever been a principle with me to respect 
the sex. But if we see women false, treacherous. . . . Why 
indulge in these abstract views, you would ask ! The world 
presses them on us, full as it is of the vilest specimens. 
They seek to pluck up every rooted principle : they sneer 
at our worship: they rob us of our religion. This bitter 
experience of the world drives us back to the antidote of 
what we knew before we plunged into it: of one ... of 
something we esteemed and still esteem. Is that antidote 
strong enough to expel the poison ? I hope so ! I believe 
so ! To lose faith in womankind is terrible.” 

He studied her. She looked distressed: she was not 
moved. 

She was thinking that, with the exception of a strain of 
haughtiness, he talked excellently to men, at least in the 
tone of the things he meant to say; but that his manner of 
talking to women went to an excess in the artificial tongue 

— the tutored tongue of sentimental deference of the tower¬ 
ing male : he fluted exceedingly; and she wondered whether 
it was this which had wrecked him with Miss Middleton. 

His intuitive sagacity counselled him to strive for pathos 
to move her. It was a task; for while he perceived her 
to be not ignorant of his plight, he doubted her knowing 
the extent of it, and as his desire was merely to move her 
without an exposure of himself, he had to compass being 
pathetic as it were under the impediments of a mailed and 
gauntletted knight, who cannot easily heave the bosom, or 
show it heaving. 

Moreover pathos is a tide: often it carries the awakener 
of it off his feet, and whirls him over and over, armour and 
all, in ignominious attitudes of helpless prostration, whereof 
he may well be ashamed in the retrospect. We cannot 
quite preserve our dignity” when we stoop to the work of 
calling forth tears. Moses had probably to take a nimble 
jump away from the rock after that venerable Law-giver 
had knocked the water out of it. 

However, it was imperative in his mind that he should be 
sure he had the power to move her. 

He began: clumsily at first, as yonder gauntletted knight 
attempting the briny handkerchief: 


522 


THE EG0IS1 


“What are we! We last but a very short time. Whj 
not live to gratify our appetites ? I might really ask my¬ 
self why. All the means of satiating them are at my dis¬ 
posal. But no: I must aim at the highest: — at that which 
in my blindness I took for the highest. You know the 
sportsman’s instinct, Lsetitia; he is not tempted by the 
stationary object. Such are we in youth, toying with happi¬ 
ness, leaving it, to aim at the dazzling and attractive.” 

“We gain knowledge,” said Lsetitia. 

“ At what cost! ” 

The exclamation summoned self-pity to his aid, and 
pathos was handy. 

“By paying half our lives for it and all our hopes ! Yes, 
we gain knowledge, we are the wiser; very probably my 
value surpasses now what it was when I was happier. But 
the loss ! That youthful bloom of the soul is like health to 
the body; once gone, it leaves cripples behind. Nay, my 
friend and precious friend, these four fingers I must retain. 
They seem to me the residue of a wreck: you shall be 
released shortly: absolutely, Laetitia, I have nothing else 
remaining. — We have spoken of deception : what of being 
undeceived ? — when one whom we adored is laid bare, and 
the wretched consolation of a worthy object is denied to us. 
No misfortune can be like that. Were it death, we could 
worship still. Death would be preferable. But may you 
be spared to know a situation in which the comparison with 
your inferior is forced on you to your disadvantage and 
your loss because of your generously giving up your whole 
heart to the custody of some shallow, light-minded, self — ! 
... we will not deal in epithets. If I were to find as 
many bad names for the serpent as there are spots on his 
body, it would be serpent still, neither better nor worse. 
. . . The loneliness! And the darkness ! Our luminary 
is extinguished. Self-respect refuses to continue worship¬ 
ping, but the affection will not be turned aside. We are 
literally in the dust, we grovel, we would fling iway self- 
respect if we could; we would adopt for a model the crea¬ 
ture preferred to us; we would humiliate, degrade ourselves; 
w T e cry for justice as if it were for pardon . . .” 

“ For pardon! when we are straining to grant it! ” 
Laetitia murmured, and it was as much as she could do. 


SIR WILLOUGHBY ACHIEVES PATHOS 323 

She remembered how in her old misery her efforts after 
charity had twisted her round to feel herself the sinner, and 
beg forgiveness in prayer: a noble sentiment, that filled her 
with pity of the bosom in which it had sprung. There was 
no similarity between his idea and hers, but her idea had 
certainly been roused by his word “ pardon,” and he had the 
benefit of it in the moisture of her eyes. Her lips trem¬ 
bled, tears fell. 

He had heard something; he had not caught the words, 
but they were manifestly favourable; her sign of emotion 
assured him of it and of the success he had sought. There 
was one woman who bowed to him to all eternity! He had 
inspired one woman with the mysterious man-desired pas¬ 
sion of self-abandonment, self-immolation ! The evidence 
was before him. At any instant he could, if he pleased, fly 
to her and command her enthusiasm. 

He had, in fact, perhaps by sympathetic action, suc¬ 
ceeded in striking the same springs of pathos in her which 
animated his lively endeavour to produce it in himself. 

He kissed her hand; then released it, quitting his chair 
to bend above her soothingly. 

“ Do not weep, Lsetitia, you see that I do not: I can smile. 
Help me to bear it; you must not unman me.” 

She tried to stop her crying ; but self-pity threatened to 
rain all her long years of grief on her head, and she said: 
“I must go ... I am unfit . . . good night, Sir Wil¬ 
loughby.” 

Fearing seriously that he had sunk his pride too low in 
her consideration, and had been carried farther than he in¬ 
tended on the tide of pathos, he remarked: “ We will speak 
about Crossjay to-morrow. His deceitfulness has been gross. 
As I said, I am grievously offended by deception. But you 
are tired. Good night, my dear friend.” 

“ Good night, Sir Willoughby.” 

She was allowed to go forth. 

Colonel De Craye coming up from the smoking-room, met 
her and noticed the state of her eyelids, as he wished her 
good-night. He saw Willoughby in the room she had 
quitted, but considerately passed without speaking, and 
without reflecting why he was considerate. 

Our hero’s review of the scene made him on the whole 


324 


THE EGOIST 


satisfied with his part in it. Of his power upon one woman 
he was now perfectly sure:— Clara had agonized him with a 
doubt of his personal mastery of any. One was a poor 
feast, but the pangs of his flesh during the last few days 
and the latest hours, caused him to snatch at it, hungrily if 
contemptuously. A poor feast, she was yet a fortress, a 
point of succour, both shield and lance; a cover and an 
impetus. He could now encounter Clara boldly. Should 
she resist and defy him, he would not be naked and alone ; 
he foresaw that he might win honour in the world’s eye 
from his position: — a matter to be thought of only in most 
urgent need. The effect on him of his recent exercise in 
pathos was to compose him to slumber. He was for the 
period well-satisfied. 

His attendant imps were well-satisfied likewise, and 
danced a round about his bed after the vigilant gentleman 
had ceased to debate on the question of his unveiling of 
himself past forgiveness of her to Laetitia, and had sur¬ 
rendered unto benignant sleep the present direction of his 
affairs. 


CHAPTER XXXII 

LJETITIA DALE DISCOVERS A SPIRITUAL CHANGE AND 
DR. MIDDLETON A PHYSICAL 

Clara tripped over the lawn in the early morning to 
Laetitia to greet her. She broke away from a colloquy with 
Colonel De Craye under Sir Willoughby’s windows. The 
colonel had been one of the bathers, and he stood like a 
circus driver, flicking a wet towel at Crossjay capering. 

“ My dear, I am very unhappy ! ” said Clara. 

“ My dear, I bring you news,” Laetitia replied. 

“Tell me. But the poor boy is to be expelled! He 
burst into Cross jay’s bed-room last night and dragged the 
sleeping boy out of bed to question him, and he had the 
truth. That is one comfort: only Crossjay is to be driven 
from the Hall because he was untruthful previously — for 
me: to serve me; really, I feel it was at my command. 



EXPERIENCES OF LiETITIA AND DR. MIDDLETON 325 


Crossjay will be out of the way to-day and has promised to 
come back at night to try to be forgiven. You must help 
me, Laetitia.” 

“ You are free, Clara! If yon desire it, you have but to 
ask for your freedom.” 

“ You mean . . . ? ” 

“ He will release you.” 

“ You are sure ?” 

“We had a long conversation last night.” 

“ I owe it to you ? ” 

“Nothing is owing to me. He volunteered it.” 

Clara made as if to lift her eyes in apostrophe. “Pro¬ 
fessor Crooklyn ! Professor Crooklyn! I see. I did not 
guess that! ” 

“ Give credit for some generosity, Clara; you are unjust.” 

“ By-and-by: I will be more than just by-and-by. I will 
practise on the trumpet: I will lecture on the greatness of 
the souls of men when we know them thoroughly. At 
present we do but half know them, and we are unjust. You 
are not deceived, Laetitia ? There is to be no speaking to 
papa ? no delusions ? You have agitated me. I feel myself 
a very small person indeed. I feel I can understand those 
who admire him. He gives me back my word simply ? 
clearly ? without — Oh ! that long wrangle in scenes and 
letters ? And it will be arranged for papa and me to go not 
later than to-morrow ? Never shall I be able to explain to 
any one how I fell into this! I am frightened at myself 
when I think of it. I take the whole blame: I have been 
scandalous. And, dear Laetitia! you came out so early in 
order to tell me?” 

“ I wished you to hear it.” 

“Take my heart.” 

“ Present me with a part — but for good! ” 

“ Fie ! But you have a right to say it.” 

“ I mean no unkindness; but is not the heart you allude 
to an alarmingly searching one ? ” 

“ Selfish it is, for I have been forgetting Crossjay. If 
we are going to be generous, is not Crossjay to be forgiven? 
If it were only that the boy’s father is away fighting for his 
country, endangering his life day by day, and for a stipend 
not enough to support his family, we are bound to think of 


326 


THE EGOIST 


the boy! Poor dear silly lad! with his ‘I say, Miss Mid¬ 
dleton, why wouldn’t (some one) see my father when he 
came here to call on him, and had to walk back ten miles 
in the rain?’ — I could almost fancy that did me mis¬ 
chief . . . But we have a splendid morning after yester¬ 
day’s rain. And we will be generous. Own, Laetitia, that 
it is possible to gild the most glorious day of creation.” 

“ Doubtless the spirit may do it and make its hues per¬ 
manent,” said Laetitia. 

“ You to me, I to you, he to us. Well, then, if he does, 
it shall be one of my heavenly days. Which is for the pro¬ 
bation of experience. We are not yet at sunset.” 

“Have you seen Mr. Whitford this morning?” 

“ He passed me.” 

“ Do not imagine him ever ill-tempered.” 

“I had a governess, a learned lady, who taught me in 
person the picturesqueness of grumpiness. Her temper 
was ever perfect, because she was never in the wrong, but I 
being so, she was grumpy. She carried my iniquity under 
her brows, and looked out on me through it. I was a try¬ 
ing child.” 

Laetitia said, laughing: “ I can believe it! ” 

“ Yet I liked her and she liked me: we were a kind of 
foreground and background: she threw me into relief, and 
I was an apology for her existence.” 

“ You picture her to me.” 

“ She says of me now, that I am the only creature she 
has loved. Who knows that I may not come to say the 
same of her ? ” 

“You would plague her and puzzle her still.” 

“ Have I plagued and puzzled Mr. Whitford ? ” 

“ He reminds you of her ? ” 

“You said you had her picture.” 

“ Ah ! do not laugh at him. He is a true friend.” 

“ The man who can be a friend is the man who will pre¬ 
sume to be a censor.” 

“ A mild one.” 

“ As to the sentence he pronounces, I am unable to speak, 
but his forehead is Bhadamanthine condemnation.” 

“Dr. Middleton!” 

Clara looked round. “ Who ? I ? Did you hear an echo 


EXPERIENCES OF L^ETITIA AND DR. MIDDLETON 327 

of papa ? He would never have put Rhadamanthus over 
European souls, because it appears that Rhadamanthus 
judged only the Asiatic; so you are wrong, Miss Dale. My 
father is infatuated with Mr. Whitford. What can it be ? 
We women cannot sound the depths of scholars, probably 
because their pearls have no value in our market; except 
when they deign to chasten an impertinent; and Mr. Wliit- 
ford stands aloof from any notice of small fry. He is 
deep, studious, excellent; and does it not strike you that 
if he descended among us he would be like a Triton 
ashore ? ” 

Laetitia’s habit of wholly subservient sweetness, which 
was her ideal of the feminine, not yet conciliated with her 
acuter character, owing to the absence of full pleasure from 
her life — the unhealed wound she had sustained and the 
cramp of a bondage of such old date as to seem iron — 
induced her to say, as if consenting: “ You think he is not 
quite at home in society ? ” But she wished to defend him 
strenuously, and as a consequence she had to quit the self- 
imposed ideal of her daily acting, whereby — the case being 
unwonted, very novel to her — the lady’s intelligence be¬ 
came confused through the process that quickened it; so 
sovereign a method of hoodwinking our bright selves is the 
acting of a part, however naturally it may come to us ! and 
to this will each honest autobiographical member of the 
animated world bear witness. 

She added : “ You have not found him sympathetic ? He 
is. You fancy him brooding, gloomy ? He is the reverse, 
he is cheerful, he is indifferent to personal misfortune. Dr. 
Corney says there is no laugh like Vernon Whitford’s, and 
no humour like his. Latterly he certainly . . . but it has 
not been your cruel word grumpiness. The truth is, he is 
anxious about Cross jay: and about other things; and he 
wants to leave. He is at a disadvantage beside very lively 
and careless gentlemen at present, but your ‘ Triton ashore ’ 
is unfair, it is ugly. He is, I can say, the truest man I 
know.” 

“ I did not question his goodness, Lsetitia.” 

“ You threw an accent on it.” 

“ Did I ? I must be like Crossjay, who declares he likes 
fun best.” 


328 


THE EGOIST 


“ Crossjay ought to know him, if anybody should. Mr. 
Whitford has defended you against me, Clara, ever since I 
took to calling you Clara. Perhaps when you supposed him 
so like your ancient governess, he was meditating how he 
could aid you. Last night he gave me reasons for thinking 
you would do wisely to confide in Mrs. Mountstuart. It is 
no longer necessary. I merely mention it. He is a devoted 
friend.” 

“ He is an untiring pedestrian.” 

“ Oh! ” 

Colonel De Craye, after hovering near the ladies in the 
hope of seeing them divide, now adopted the method of 
making three that two may come of it. 

As he joined them with his glittering chatter, Laetitia 
looked at Clara to consult her, and saw the face rosy as a 
bride’s. 

The suspicion she had nursed sprang out of her arms a 
muscular fact on the spot. 

“ Where is my dear boy ? ” Clara said. 

“ Out for a holiday,” the colonel answered in her tone. 

“ Advise Mr. Whitford not to waste his time in searching 
for Cross jay, Laetitia. Cross jay is better out of the way to¬ 
day. At least, I thought so just now. Has he pocket-money, 
Colonel De Craye ? ” 

“ My lord can command his inn.” 

“ How thoughtful you are ! ” 

Laetitia’s bosom swelled upon a mute exclamation, equiva¬ 
lent to: ‘ Woman! woman ! snared ever by the sparkling 
and frivolous ! undiscerning of the faithful, the modest and 
beneficent! ” 

In the secret musings of moralists this dramatic rhetoric 
survives. 

The comparison was all of her own making and she was 
indignant at the contrast, though to what end she was indig¬ 
nant she could not have said, for she had no idea of Vernon 
as a rival of De Craye in the favour of a plighted lady. 
But she was jealous on behalf of her sex: her sex’s reputa¬ 
tion seemed at stake, and the purity of it was menaced by 
Clara’s idle preference of the shallower man. When the 
young lady spoke so carelessly of being like Crossjay, she 
did not perhaps know that a likeness, based on a similarity 


EXPERIENCES OF LJETITIA AND DE. MIDDLETON 329 


of their enthusiasms, loves, and appetites, has been estab¬ 
lished between women and boys. Laetitia had formerly 
chafed at it, rejecting it utterly, save when now and then 
in a season of bitterness she handed here and there a 
volatile j^oung lady (none but the young) to be stamped with 
the degrading brand. Vernon might be as philosophical as 
he pleased. To her the gaiety of these two, Colonel De 
Craye and Clara Middleton, was distressingly musical: they 
harmonized painfully. The representative of her sex was 
hurt by it. 

She had to stay beside them : Clara held her arm. The 
colonel’s voice dropped at times to something very like a 
whisper. He was answered audibly and smoothly. The 
quick-witted gentleman accepted the correction: but in 
immediately paying assiduous attentions to Miss Dale, in 
the approved intriguer’s fashion, he showed himself in need 
of another amounting to a reproof. Clara said: “ We have 
been consulting, Laetitia, what is to be done to cure Profes¬ 
sor Crooklyn of his cold.” De Craye perceived that he had 
taken a wrong step, and he was mightily surprised that a 
lesson in intrigue should be read to him of all men. Miss 
Middleton’s audacity was not so astonishing: he recognized 
grand capabilities in the young lady. Fearing lest she 
should proceed farther and cut away from him his vantage- 
ground of secresy with her, he turned the subject and was 
adroitly submissive. 

Clara’s manner of meeting Sir Willoughby expressed a 
timid disposition to friendliness upon a veiled inquiry, under¬ 
stood by none save Laetitia, whose brain was racked to 
convey assurances to herself of her not having misinterpreted 
him. Could there be any doubt ? She resolved that there 
could not be j and it was upon this basis of reason — that she 
fancied she had led him to it. Legitimate or not, the fancy 
sprang from a solid foundation. Yesterday morning she 
could not have conceived it. Now she was endowed to feel 
that she had power to influence him, because now, since the 
midnight, she felt some emancipation from the spell of his 
physical mastery. He did not appear to her as a different 
man, but she had grown sensible of being a stronger woman. 
He was no more the cloud over her, nor the magnet; the 
cloud once heaven-suffusad, tha magnet fatally compelling 


330 


THE EGOIST 


her to sway round to him. She admired him still: his hand¬ 
some air, his fine proportions, the courtesy of his bending 
to Clara and touching of her hand, excused a fanatical excess 
of admiration on the part of a woman in her youth, who is 
never the anatomist of the hero’s lordly graces. But now 
she admired him piecemeal. When it came to the putting of 
him together, she did it coldly. To compassionate him was 
her utmost warmth. Without conceiving in him anything 
of the strange old monster of earth which had struck the 
awakened girl’s mind of Miss Middleton, Lsetitia classed him 
with other men: he was “ one of them.” And she did not 
bring her disenchantment as a charge against him. She 
accused herself, acknowledged the secret of the change to be, 
that her youthfulness was dead : — otherwise could she have 
given him compassion, and not herself have been carried on 
the flood of it ? The compassion was fervent, and pure too. 
She supposed he would supplicate; she saw that Clara Mid¬ 
dleton was pleasant with him only for what she expected of 
his generosity. She grieved. Sir Willoughby was fortified 
by her sorrowful gaze as he and Clara passed out together 
to the laboratory arm in arm. 

Laetitia had to tell Vernon of the uselessness of his beat¬ 
ing the house and grounds for Crossjay. Dr. Middle tow 
held him fast in discussion upon an overnight’s classical 
wrangle with Professor Crooklyn, which was to be renewed 
that day. The Professor had appointed to call expressly to 
renew it. “A fine scholar,” said the Rev. Doctor, “but 
crotchetty, like all men who cannot stand their Port.” 

“ I hear that he had a cold,” Vernon remarked. “ I hope 
the wine was good, sir.” 

As when the foreman of a sentimental jury is commis¬ 
sioned to inform an awful Bench exact in perspicuous 
English, of a verdict that must of necessity be pronounced 
in favour of the hanging of the culprit, yet would fain at¬ 
tenuate the crime of a palpable villain by a recommends 
tion to mercy, 6uch foreman, standing in the attentive eye 
of a master of grammatical construction, and feeling the 
weight of at least three sentences on his brain, together 
with a prospect of judicial interrogation for the discovery 
of his precise meaning, is oppressed, himself is put on trial 
in turn, and he hesitates, he recapitulates, the fear of invo* 


EXPERIENCES OF L^TITIA AND DR. MIDDLETON 331 


lution leads him to be involved; as far as a man so posted 
may, he on his own behalf appeals for mercy ; entreats that 
his indistinct statement of preposterous reasons may be 
taken for understood, and would gladly, were permission to 
do it credible, throw in an imploring word, that he may 
sink back among the crowd without for the one imperish¬ 
able moment publicly swinging in his lordship’s estimation: 
— much so, moved by chivalry toward a lady, courtesy to 
the recollection of a hostess, and particularly by the knowl¬ 
edge that his hearer would expect with a certain frigid 
rigour charity of him, Dr. Middleton paused, spoke and 
paused: he stammered. Ladies, he said, were famous 
poisoners in the Middle Ages. His opinion was, that we 
had a class of manufacturing wine-merchants on the watch 
for widows in this country. But he was bound to state the 
fact of his waking at his usual hour to the minute unassailed 
by headache. On the other hand, this was a condition of 
blessedness unanticipated when he went to bed. Mr. 
Whitford, however, was not to think that he entertained 
rancour toward the wine. It was no doubt dispensed with 
the honourable intention of cheering. In point of flavour 
execrable, judging by results it was innocuous. 

“ The test of it shall be the effect of it upon Professor 
Crooklyn, and his appearance in the forenoon according to 
promise,” Dr. Middleton came to an end with his perturbed 
balancings. “ If I hear more of the eight or twelve winds 
discharged at once upon a railway platform, and the young 
lady who dries herself of a drenching by drinking brandy 
and water with a gentleman at a railway inn, I shall solicit 
your sanction to my condemnation of the wine as anti- 
Bacchic and a counterfeit presentment. Do not misjudge 
me. Our hostess is not responsible. But widows should 
marry.” 

“ You must contrive to stop the Professor, sir, if he should 
attack his hostess in that manner,” said Vernon. 

“Widows should marry !” Dr. Middleton repeated. 

He murmured of objecting to be at the discretion of a 
butler: unless, he was careful to add, the aforesaid func¬ 
tionary could boast of an University education: and even 
then, said he, it requires a line of ancestry to train a man’s 
taste. 


332 


THE EGOIST 


The Bev. Doctor smothered a yawn. The repression of it 
caused a second one, a real monster, to come, big as our old 
friend of the sea advancing on the chained-up Beauty. 

Disconcerted by this damning evidence of indigestion, his 
countenance showed that he considered himself to have been 
too lenient to the wine of an unhusbanded hostess. He 
frowned terribly. 

In the interval Lsetitia told Vernon of Crossjay’s flight 
for the day, hastily bidding the master to excuse him: she 
had no time to hint the grounds of excuse. Vernon men¬ 
tally made a guess. 

Dr. Middleton took his arm and discharged a volley at the 
crotchetty scholarship of Professor Crooklyn, whom to con¬ 
fute by book, he directed his march to the library. Having 
persuaded himself that he was dyspeptic, he had grown 
irascible. He denounced all dining out, eulogized Patterne 
Hall as if it were his home, and remembered he had 
dreamed in the night: — a most humiliating sign of physical 
disturbance. “But let me find a house in proximity to 
Patterne, as I am induced to suppose I shall,” he said, “and 
here only am I to be met when I stir abroad.” 

Lsetitia went to her room. She was complacently anx¬ 
ious, enough to prefer solitude and be willing to read. 
She was more seriously anxious about Cross jay than about 
any of the others. For Clara would be certain to speak 
very definitely, and how then could a gentleman oppose 
her ? He would supplicate, and could she be brought to 
yield ? It was not to be expected of a young lady who had 
turned from Sir Willoughby. His inferiors would have had 
a better chance. Whatever his faults, he had that element 
of greatness which excludes the intercession of pity. Sup¬ 
plication would be with him a form of condescension. It 
would be seen to be such. His was a monumental pride 
that could not stoop. She had preserved this image of the 
gentleman for a relic in the shipwreck of her idolatry. So 
she mused between the lines of her book, and finishing her 
reading and marking the page, she glanced down on the 
lawn. Dr. Middleton was there, and alone; his hands 
behind his back, his head bent. His meditative pace and 
unwonted perusal of the turf proclaimed that a non- 
sentimental jury within had delivered an unmitigated 


THE COMIC MUSE ON TWO GOOD SOULS 333 


verdict upon the widow’s wine. Laetitia hurried to find 
Vernon. 

He was in the hall. As she drew near him, the labors 
tory door opened and shut. 

“ It is being decided,” said Laetitia. 

Vernon was paler than the hue of perfect calmness. 

“ I want to know whether I ought to take to my heels 
like Crossjay, and shun the Professor,” he said. 

They spoke in undertones, furtively watching the door. 

“ I wish what she wishes, I am sure, but it will go badly 
with the boy,” said Laetitia. 

“ Oh, well, then I ’ll take him,” said Vernon, “ I would 
rather. I think I can manage it.” 

Again the laboratory door opened. This time it shut 
behind Miss Middleton. She was highly flushed. Seeing 
them, she shook the storm from her brows, with a dead 
smile: the best piece of serenity she could put on for public 
wear. 

She took a breath before she moved. 

Vernon strode out of the house. 

Clara swept up to Laetitia. 

“ You were deceived! ” 

The hard sob of anger barred her voice. 

Laetitia begged her to come to her room with her. 

“ I want air: I must be by myself,” said Clara, catching 
at her garden-hat. 

She walked swiftly to the portico-steps and turned to the 
right, to avoid the laboratory windows. 


CHAPTEK XXXIII 

IN WHICH THE COMIC MUSE HAS AN EYE ON TWO 
GOOD SOULS 

Clara met Vernon on the bowling-green among the 
laurels. She asked him where her father was. 

“ Don’t speak to him now,” said Vernon. 

“ Mr. Whitford, will you ? ” 



334 


THE EGOIST 


“ It is not adviseable just now. Wait.” 

“ Wait ? Why not now ?” 

“He is not in the right humour.” 

She choked. There are times when there is no medicine 
for us in sages, we want slaves; we scorn to temporize, 
we must overbear. On she sped, as if she had made the 
mistake of exchanging words with a post. 

The scene between herself and Willoughby was a thick 
mist in her head, except the burden and result of it, that 
he held to her fast, and would neither assist her to depart 
nor disengage her. 

Oh, men ! men ! They astounded the girl; she could not 
define them to her understanding. Their motives, their 
tastes, their vanity, their tyranny, and the domino on their 
vanity, the baldness of their tyranny, clenched her in 
feminine antagonism to brute power. She was not the less 
disposed to rebellion by a very present sense of the justice 
of what could be said to reprove her. She had but one 
answer: “Anything but marry him ! ” It threw her on her 
nature, our last and headlong advocate, who is quick as the 
flood to hurry us from the heights to our level, and lower, 
if there be accidental gaps in the channel. For say we 
have been guilty of misconduct: can we redeem it by vio¬ 
lating that w 7 hich we are and live by? The question sinks 
us back to the luxuriousness of a sunny relinquishment of 
effort in the direction against tide. Our nature becomes 
ingenious in devices, penetrative of the enemy, confidently 
citing its cause for being frankly elvish or worse. Clara 
saw a particular way of forcing herself to be surrendered. 
She shut her eyes from it: the sight carried her too vio¬ 
lently to her escape: but her heart caught it up and huz¬ 
zaed. To press the points of her fingers at her bosom, 
looking up to the sky as she did, and cry, “ I am not my 
own ; I am his ! ” was instigation sufficient to make her 
heart leap up with all her body’s blush to urge it to reck¬ 
lessness. A despairing creature then may say she has 
addressed the heavens and has had no answer to restrain 
her. 

Happily for Miss Middleton she had walked some minutes 
in her chafing fit before the falcon eye of Colonel Do Craye 
spied her away on 3>ne of the beech-knolls. 


THE COMIC MUSE ON TWO GOOD SOULS 385 


Vernon stood irresolute. It was decidedly not a moment 
for disturbing Dr. Middleton’s composure. He meditated 
upon a conversation, as friendly as possible, with Wil¬ 
loughby. Round on the front-lawn he beheld Willoughby 
and Dr. Middleton together, the latter having halted to 
lend attentive ear to his excellent host. Unnoticed by 
them or disregarded, Vernon turned back to Laetitia, and 
sauntered talking with her of things current for as long 
as he could endure to listen to praise of his pure self- 
abnegation ; proof of how well he had disguised himself, but 
it smacked unpleasantly to him. His humourous intimacy 
with men’s minds likened the source of this distaste to the 
gallant all-or-nothing of the gambler, who hates the little 
when he cannot have the much, and would rather stalk 
from the tables clean-picked than suffer ruin to be tickled 
by driblets of the glorious fortune he has played for and 
lost. If we are not to be beloved, spare us the small coin 
of compliments on character: especially when they compli¬ 
ment only our acting. It is partly endurable to win eulogy 
for our stately fortitude in losing, but Laetitia was unaware 
that he flung away a stake; so she could not praise him 
for his merits. 

" Willoughby makes the pardoning of Crossjay condi¬ 
tional,” he said, “and the person pleading for him has 
to grant the terms. How could you imagine Willoughby 
would give her up! How could he ! Who! . . . He should, 
is easily said. I was no witness of the scene between them 
just now, but I could have foretold the end of it; I could 
almost recount the passages. The consequence is, that 
everything depends upon the amount of courage she pos¬ 
sesses. Dr. Middleton won’t leave Patterne yet. And it 
is of no use to speak to him to-day. And she is by nature 
impatient, and is rendered desperate.” 

“ Why is it of no use to speak to Dr. Middleton to-day ? ” 
said Laetitia. 

“ He drank wine yesterday that did not agree with him; 
he can’t work. To-day he is looking forward to Patterne 
Port. He is not likely to listen to any proposals to leave 
to-day.” 

“ Goodness! ” 

“ 1 know the depth of that cry 1 * , 


336 


THE EGOIST 


" You are excluded, Mr. Whitford.” 

“ Not a bit of it; I am in with the rest. Say that men 
are to be exclaimed at. Men have a right to expect you to 
know your own mind when you close on a bargain. You 
don’t know the world or yourselves very well, it’s true; 
still the original error is on your side, and upon that you 
should fix your attention. She brought her father here, 
and no sooner was he very comfortably established than she 
wished to dislocate him.” 

“ I cannot explain it; I cannot comprehend it,” said 
Lsetitia. 

“ You are Constancy.” 

“ No.” She coloured. “ I am ‘ in with the rest/ I do not 
say I should have done the same. But I have the knowledge 
that I must not sit in judgement on her. I can waver.” 

She coloured again. She was anxious that he should 
know her to be not that stupid statue of Constancy in a 
corner doting on the antic Deception. Reminiscences of 
the interview over night made it oppressive to her to hear her¬ 
self praised for always pointing like the needle. Her newly 
enfranchised individuality pressed to assert its existence. 
Vernon, however, not seeing this novelty, continued, to her 
excessive discomfort, to baste her old abandoned image with 
his praises. They checked hers; and moreover he had 
suddenly conceived an envy of her life-long, uncomplain¬ 
ing, almost unaspiring, constancy of sentiment. If you 
know lovers when they have not reason to be blissful, you 
will remember that in this mood of admiring envy they are 
given to fits of uncontrollable maundering. Praise of con¬ 
stancy, moreover, smote shadowily a certain inconstant, 
enough to seem to ruffle her smoothness and do no hurt. 
He found his consolation in it, and poor Laetitia writhed. 
Without designing to retort, she instinctively grasped at a 
weapon of defence in further exalting his devotedness ; 
which reduced him to cast his head to the heavens and 
implore them to partially enlighten her. Nevertheless, 
maunder he must; and he recurred to it in a way so utterly 
unlike himself that Laetitia stared in his face. She won¬ 
dered whether there could be anything secreted behind this 
everlasting theme of constancy. He took her awakened 
gaze for a summons to asseverations of sincerity, and out 


THE COMIC MUSE ON TWO GOOD SOUDS 337 

they came. She would have fled from him, but to think of 
flying was to think how little it was that urged her to fly, 
and yet the thought of remaining and listening to praises 
undeserved and no longer flattering, was a torture. 

“ Mr. Whitford, I bear no comparison with you.” 

“ I do and must set you for my example, Miss Dale.” 

“ Indeed you do wrongly; you do not know me.” 

“ I could say that. For years ! . . . ” 

“ Pray, Mr. Whitford ! ” 

“ Well, I have admired it. You show us how self can be 
smothered.” 

“ An echo would be a retort on you ! ” 

“On me ? I am never thinking of anything else.” 

“ I could say that.” 

“ You are necessarily conscious of not swerving.” 

“ But I do ; I waver dreadfully ; I am not the same two 
days running.” 

“You are the same, with ‘ ravishing divisions ’ upon the 
same.” 

“ And you without the ‘ divisions.’ I draw such support 
as I have from you.” 

“ From some simulacrum of me, then. And that will 
show you how little you require support.” 

“ I do not speak my own opinion only.” 

“ Whose ? ” 

“ I am not alone.” 

“ Again let me say, I wish I were like you! ” 

“ Then let me add, I would willingly make the ex¬ 
change ! ” 

“You would be amazed at your bargain.” 

“ Others would be ! ” 

“Your exchange would give me the qualities I am in 
want of, Miss Dale.” 

“Negative, passive, at the best, Mr. Whitford. But 1 
should have . . .” 

“ Oh ! — pardon me. But you inflict the sensations of a 
boy, with a dose of honesty in him, called up to receive a 
prize he has won by the dexterous use of a crib.” 

“ And how do you suppose she feels, who has a crown of 
Queen o’ the May forced on her head when she is verging 
on November ? ” 


338 


THE EGOIST 


He rejected her analogy, and she his. They could neither 
of them bring to light the circumstances which made on/? 
another’s admiration so unbearable. The more he exalted 
her for constancy, the more did her mind become bent upon 
critically examining the object of that imagined virtue; and 
the more she praised him for possessing the spirit of per¬ 
fect friendliness, the fiercer grew the passion in him which 
disdained the imputation, hissing like a heated iron-bar that 
flings the water-drops to steam. He would none of it: would 
rather have stood exposed in his profound foolishness. 

Amiable though they were, and mutually affectionate, 
they came to a stop in their walk, longing to separate, and 
not seeing how it was to be done, they had so knit them¬ 
selves together with the pelting of their interlaudation. 

“ I think it is time for me to run home to my father for 
an hour,” said Lsetitia. 

“ I ought to be working,” said Vernon. 

Good progress was made to the disgarlanding of them¬ 
selves thus far; yet, an acutely civilized pair, the abrupt¬ 
ness of the transition from floweriness to commonplace 
affected them both, Laetitia chiefly, as she had broken the 
pause, and she remarked, — 

“I am really Constancy in my opinions.” 

“ Another title is customary where stiff opinions are con¬ 
cerned. Perhaps by-and-by you will learn your mistake, 
and then you will acknowledge the name for it.” 

“ How ? ” said she. “ What shall I learn ? ” 

“ If you learn that I am a grisly Egoist ? ” 

“You? And it would not be egoism,” added Lsetitia, 
revealing to him at the same instant as to herself, that she 
swung suspended on a scarce credible guess. 

“— Will nothing pierce your ears, Mr. Whitford ?” 

He heard the intruding voice, but he was bent on rubbing 
out the cloudy letters Laetitia had begun to spell, and he 
stammered in a tone of matter-of-fact: “ Just that and no 
better;” then turned to Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson. 

“ — Or are you resolved you will never see Professor 
Crooklyn when you look on him ? ” said the great lady. 

Vernon bowed to the Professor and apologized to him 
shufflingly and rapidly, incoherently, and with a red face; 
which induced Mrs. Mountstuart to scan Laetitia’s. 


THE come MUSE ON TWO GOOD SOULS 339 

After lecturing Vernon for his abandonment of her yes¬ 
terday evening, and flouting his protestations, she returned 
to the business of the day. “ We walked from the lodge- 
gates to see the park and prepare ourselves for Dr. Middle- 
ton. We parted last night in the middle of a controversy 
and are rageing to resume it. Where is our redoubtable 
antagonist ? ” 

Mrs. Mountstuart wheeled Professor Crooklyn round to 
accompany Vernon. 

“We,” she said, “are for modern English scholarship, 
opposed to the champion of German.” 

“ The contrary,” observed Professor Crooklyn. 

“Oh. We,” she corrected the error serenely, “are for 
German scholarship, opposed to English.” 

“ Certain editions.” 

“We defend certain editions.” 

“ Defend, is a term of imperfect application to my posi¬ 
tion, ma’am.” 

“ My dear Professor, you have in Dr. Middleton a match 
for you in conscientious pugnacity, and you will not waste it 
upon me. There, there they are ; there he is. Mr. Whitford 
will conduct you. I stand away from the first shock.” 

Mrs. Mountstuart fell back to Lsetitia, saying: “He 
pores over a little inexactitude in phrases, and pecks at it 
like a domestic fowl.” 

Professor Crooklyn’s attitude and air were so well de¬ 
scribed that Lsetitia could have laughed. 

“These mighty scholars have their flavour,” the great 
lady hastened to add, lest her younger companion should be 
misled to suppose that they were not valuable to a govern¬ 
ing hostess: “ their shadow-fights are ridiculous, but they 
have their flavour at a table. Last night, no: I discard all 
mention of last night. We failed: as none else in this 
neighbourhood could fail, but we failed. If we have among 
us a cormorant devouring young lady who drinks up all the 
— ha! — brandy and water — of our inns and occupies all 
our flys, why, our condition is abnormal, and we must 
expect to fail: we are deprived of accommodation for acci¬ 
dental circumstances. How Mr. Whitford could have 
missed seeing Professor Crooklyn! And what was he 
doing at the station, Miss Dale ? ” 


340 


THE EGOIST 


“ Your portrait of Professor Crooklyn was too striking, 
Mrs. Mountstuart, and deceived him by its excellence. He 
appears to have seen only the blank side of the slate.” 

“ Ah. He is a faithful friend of his cousin, do you not 
think ? ” 

“ He is the truest of friends.” 

“ As for Dr. Middleton,” Mrs. Mountstuart diverged from 
her inquiry, “ he will swell the letters of my vocabulary 
to gigantic proportions if I see much of him: he is com 
tagious.” 

“I believe it is a form of his humour.” 

“ I caught it of him yesterday at my dinner-table in my 
distress, and must pass it off as a form of mine, while it 
lasts. I talked Dr. Middleton half the dreary night through 
to my pillow. Your candid opinion, my dear, come ! As 
for me, I don’t hesitate. We seemed to have sat down to a 
solitary performance on the bass-viol. We were positively 
an assembly of insects during thunder. My very soul 
thanked Colonel De Craye for his diversions, but I heard 
nothing but Dr. Middleton. It struck me that my table was 
petrified, and every one sat listening to bowls played over¬ 
head.” 

“ I was amused.” 

“Keally? You delight me. Who knows but that my 
guests were sincere in their congratulations on a thoroughly 
successful evening ? I have fallen to this, you see! And i 
know, wretched people! that as often as not it is their way 
of condoling with one. I do it myself: but only where there 
have been amiable efforts. But imagine my being congrat¬ 
ulated for that! — Good morning, Sir Willoughby. — The 
worst offender ! and I am in no pleasant mood with him,” 
Mrs. Mountstuart said aside to Laetitia, who drew back, 
retiring. 

Sir Willoughby came on a step or two. He stopped to 
watch Laetitia’s figure swimming to the house. 

So, as, for instance, beside a stream, when a flower on the 
surface extends its petals drowning to subside in the clear 
still water, we exercise our privilege to be absent in the 
charmed contemplation of a beautiful natural incident. 

A smile of pleased abstraction melted on his features. 


MRS. MOUNTSTUART AND SIR WILLOUGHBY 341 


CHAPTER XXXIV 

MRS. MOUNTSTUART AND SIR WILLOUGHBY 

u Good morning, my dear Mrs. Mountstuart,” Sir Wil* 
loughby wakened himself to address the great lady. “ Why 
has she fled? ” 

“ Has any one fled ? ” 

“ Laetitia Dale.” 

“ Letty Dale ? Oh ! if you call that flying. Possibly to 
renew a close conversation with Vernon Whitford, that I 
cut short. You frightened me with your * Shepherds-tell- 
me 9 air and tone. Lead me to one of your garden-seats : 
out of hearing to Dr. Middleton, I beg. He mesmerizes me, 
he makes me talk Latin. I was curiously susceptible last 
night. I know I shall everlastingly associate him with an 
abortive entertainment and solos on big instruments. We 
were flat.” 

“ Horace was in good vein.” 

“ You were not.” 

“And Laetitia—Miss Dale talked well, I thought.” 

“ She talked with you, and no doubt she talked well. We 
did not mix. The yeast was bad. You shot darts at Colonel 
De Craye: you tried to sting. You brought Dr. Middleton 
down on you. Dear me, that man is a reverberation in my 
head. Where is your lady and love ? ” 

“ Who ? ” 

“ Am I to name her ? ” 

“ Clara ? I have not seen her for the last hour. Wan¬ 
dering, I suppose.” 

“ A very pretty summer-bower,” said Mrs. Mountstuart, 
seating herself. “ Well, my dear Sir Willoughby, prefer¬ 
ences, preferences are not to be accounted for, and one never 
knows whether to pity or congratulate, whatever may occur. 
I want to see Miss Middleton.” 

“ Your ‘ dainty rogue in porcelain ? will be at your beck «- 
you lunch with us ? — before you leave.” 

“ So now you have taken to quoting me, have you ? ” 


342 


THE EGOIST 


“But *a romantic tale on her eyelashes’ is hardly de« 
scriptive any longer.” 

“ Descriptive of whom ? Now you are upon Laetitia 
Dale! ” 

“ I quote you generally. She has now a graver look.” 

“ And well may have ! ” 

“ Not that the romance has entirely disappeared.” 

“ No: it looks as if it were in print.” 

“ You have hit it perfectly, as usual, ma’am.” 

Sir Willoughby mused. 

Like one resuming his instrument to take up the melody 
in a concerted piece, he said . “ I thought Laetitia Dale had 
a singularly animated air last night.” 

“Why!—” Mrs. Mountstuart mildly gaped. 

“ I want a new description of her. You know, I collect 
your mottoes and sentences.” 

“It seems to me she is coming three parts out of her 
shell, and wearing it as a hood for convenience.” 

“ Ready to issue forth at an invitation ? Admirable! 
exact! ” 

“ Ay, my good Sir Willoughby, but are we so very admi¬ 
rable and exact ? Are we never to know our own minds ? ” 

He produced a polysyllabic sigh, like those many-jointed 
compounds of poets in happy languages, which are copious 
in a single expression: “ Mine is known to me. It always 
has been. Cleverness in women is not uncommon. Intel¬ 
lect is the pearl. A woman of intellect is as good as a Greek 
statue ; she is divinely wrought, and she is divinely rare.” 

“ Proceed, ” said the lady, confiding a cough to the air. 

“ The rarity of it: and it is not mere intellect, it is a 
sympathetic intellect; or else it is an intellect in perfect 
accord with an intensely sympathetic disposition; — the 
rarity of it makes it too precious to be parted with when 
once we have met it. I prize it the more the older I 
grow.” 

“ Are we on the feminine or the neuter ? ” 

“ I beg pardon ? ” 

“ The universal or the individual ? ” 

He shrugged. “ For the rest, psychological affinities may 
•exist coincident with and entirely independent of material or 
moral prepossessions, relations, engagements, ties.” 


MRS. MOUNTSTUART AND SIR WILLOUGHBY 343 


“ Well, that is not the raving of passion, certainly,” saitf 
Mrs. Mountstuart, “ and it sounds as if it were a comfortable 
doctrine for men. On that plea, you might all of you be 
having Aspasia and a wife. We saw your fair Middleton 
and Colonel De Craye at a distance as we entered the park. 
Professor Crooklyn is under some hallucination.” 

“ What more likely ? ” 

The readiness and the double-bearing of the reply struck 
her comic sense with awe. 

“ The Professor must hear that. He insists on the fly, 
and the inn, and the wet boots, and the warming mixture, 
and the testimony of the landlady and the railway porter.” 

“I say, what more likely ?” 

“ Than that he should insist ? ” 

“ If he is under the hallucination! ” 

“He may convince others.” 

“ I have only to repeat! . . . ” 

“‘What more likely?’ It’s extremely philosophical. 
Coincident with a pursuit of the psychological affinities.” 

“ Professor Crooklyn will hardly descend, I suppose, from 
his classical altitudes to lay his hallucinations before Dr. 
Middleton ? ’ 

“ Sir Willoughby, you are the pink of chivalry! ” 

By harping on Laetitia, he had emboldened Mrs. Mount¬ 
stuart to lift the curtain upon Clara. It was offensive to 
him, but the injury done to his pride had to be endured for 
the sake of his general plan of self-protection. 

“ Simply desirous to save my guests from annoyance of 
any kind,” he said. “ Dr. Middleton can look * Olympus 
and thunder/ as Vernon calls it.” 

“ Don’t. I see him. That look! It is Dictionary-bitten ! 
Angry, horned Dictionary ! — an apparition of Dictionary in 
the night — to a dunce ! ” 

“ One would undergo a good deal to avoid the sight.” 

“ What the man must be in a storm ! Speak as you please 
of yourself: you are a true and chivalrous knight to dread 
it for her. But now candidly, how is it you cannot con¬ 
descend to a little management ? Listen to an old friend. 
You are too lordly. No lover can afford to be incompre¬ 
hensible for half an hour. Stoop a little. Sermonizings 
are not to be thought of. You can govern unseen. You are 


344 


THE EGOIST 


to know that I am one who disbelieves in philosophy in love. 
I admire the look of it, I give no credit to the assumption. 
I rather like lovers to be out at times : it makes them 
picturesque, and it enlivens their monotony. I perceived 
she had a spot of wildness. It’s proper that she should 
wear it off before marriage. ,, 

“ Clara ? The wildness of an infant! ” said Willoughby, 
paternally musing over an inward shiver. “ You saw her at 
a distance just now, or you might have heard her laughing. 
Horace diverts her excessively.” 

“ I owe him my eternal gratitude for his behaviour last 
night. She was one of my bright faces. Her laughter was 
delicious; rain in the desert! It will tell you what the load 
on me was, when I assure you those two were merely a 
spectacle to me — points I scored in a lost game. And I 
know they were witty.” 

“They both have wit; a kind of wit,” Willoughby 
assented. 

“ They struck together like a pair of cymbals.” 

“Not the highest description of instrument. However, 
they amuse me. I like to hear them when I am in the 
vein.” 

“ That vein should be more at command with you, my 
friend. You can be perfect, if you like.” 

“ Under your tuition.” 

Willoughby leaned to her, bowing languidly. He was 
easier in his pain for having hoodwinked the lady. She 
was the outer world to him; she could tune the world’s 
voice; prescribe which of the two was to be pitied, himself 
or Clara; and he did not intend it to be himself, if it came 
to the worst. 

They were far away from that at present, and he contin¬ 
ued : “ Probably a man’s power of putting on a face is not 
equal to a girl’s. I detest petty dissensions. Probably I 
show it when all is not quite smooth. Little fits of suspicion 
vex me. It is a weakness, not to play them off, I know. 
Men have to learn the arts which come to women by nature. 
I don’t sympathize with suspicion, from having none my¬ 
self.” 

His eyebrows shot up. That ill-omened man Flitch had 
sidled round by the bushes to within a few feet of him. 


MBS. MOUNTSTUART AND SIB WILLOUGHBY 345 


Flitch primarily defended himself against the accusation 
of drunkenness, which was hurled at him to account for hij 
audacity in trespassing against the interdict: but he admitted 
that he had taken “ something short ” for a fortification in 
visiting scenes where he had once been happy — at Christ- 
mastide, when all the servants, and the butler at head, gray 
old Mr. Chessington, sat in rows, toasting the young heir of 
the old Hall in the old port wine! Happy had he been 
then, before ambition for a shop, to be his own master and 
an independent gentleman, had led him into his quagmire : 
— to look back envying a dog on the old estate, and sigh 
for the smell of Patterne stables: sweeter than Arabia, his 
drooping nose appeared to say. 

He held up close against it something that imposed silence 
on Sir Willoughby as effectually as a cunning exordium in 
oratory will enchain mobs to swallow what is not compli¬ 
menting them: and this he displayed, secure in its being his 
license to drivel his abominable pathos. Sir Willoughby 
recognized Clara’s purse. He understood at once how the 
man must have come by it: he was not so quick in devising 
a means of stopping the tale. Flitch foiled him. “ Intact.” 
he replied to the question : “ What have you there ? ” He 
repeated this grand word. And then he turned to Mrs. 
Mountstuart to speak of Paradise and Adam, in whom he 
saw the prototype of himself: also the Hebrew people iiL 
the bondage of Egypt, discoursed of by the clergymen, not 
without a likeness to him. 

“ Sorrows have done me one good, to send me attentive 
to church, my lady,” said Flitch, “ when I might have gone 
to London, the coachman’s home, and been driving some 
honourable family, with no great advantage to my morals, 
according to what I hear of. And a purse found under the 
seat of a fly in London would have a poor chance of return¬ 
ing intact to the young lady losing it.” 

“ Put it down on that chair; inquiries will be made, and 
you will see Sir Willoughby,” said Mrs. Mountstuart. “ In¬ 
tact, no doubt; it is not disputed.” 

With one motion of a finger she set the man rounding, 
Flitch halted: he was very regretful of the termination of 
his feast of pathos, and he wished to relate the finding of 
the purse, but he could not encounter Mrs. Mountstuart’? 


346 


THE EGOIST 


look: he slouched away in very close resemblance to the 
ejected Adam of illustrated books. 

“It’s my belief that naturalness among the common 
people has died out of the kingdom/’ she said. 

Willoughby charitably apologized for him. “ He has 
been fuddling himself.” 

Her vigilant considerateness had dealt the sensitive gen* 
tleman a shock, plainly telling him she had her ideas of his 
actual posture. Nor was he unhurt by her superior acute¬ 
ness and her display of authority on his grounds. 

He said boldly, as he weighed the purse, half tossing it: 
il It’s not unlike Clara’s.” 

He feared that his lips and cheeks were twitching, and as 
he grew aware of a glassiness of aspect that would reflect 
any suspicion of a keen-eyed woman, he became bolder 
still: “ Laetitia’s, I know it is not. Hers is an ancient 
purse.” 

“ A present from you! ” 

“ How do you hit on that, my dear lady ? ” 

“ Deductively.” 

“ Well, the purse looks as good as new in quality, like the 
owner.” 

“ The poor dear has not much occasion for using it.” 

u You are mistaken : she uses it daily.” 

“If it were better filled, Sir Willoughby, your old scheme 
might be arranged. The parties do not appear so unwilling. 
Professor Crooklyn and I came on them just now rather by 
surprise, and I assure you their heads were close, faces 
meeting, eyes musing.” 

“ Impossible.” 

“ Because when they approach the point, you won’t allow 
it! Selfish!” 

“ Now,” said Willoughby, very animatedly, “ question 
Clara. Now, do, my dear Mrs. Mountstuart, do speak to 
Clara on that head; she will convince you I have striven 
quite recently : — against myself, if you like. I have in¬ 
structed her to aid me, given her the fullest instructions, 
carte blanche. She cannot possibly have a doubt. I may 
look to her to remove any you may entertain from your 
mind on the subject. I have proposed, seconded and cho- 
russed it, and it will not be arranged. If you expect me to 


MRS. MOUNTSTUART AND SIR WILLOUGHBY 347 

deplore that fact, I can only answer that my actions are 
under my control, my feelings are not. I will do everything 
consistent with the duties of a man of honour: perpetually 
running into fatal errors because he did not properly 
consult the dictates of those feelings at the right season. 
I can violate them: but I can no more command them than 
I can my destiny. They were crushed of old, and so let 
them be now. Sentiments, we won’t discuss; though you 
kno\: that sentiments have a bearing on social life: are 
factors, as they say in their later jargon. I never speak of 
mine. To you I could. It is not necessary. If vld Vernon, 
instead of flattening his chest at a desk had any manly am¬ 
bition to take part in public affairs, she would be the woman 
for him. I have called her my Egeria. She would be his 
Cornelia. One could swear of her that she would have 
noble offspring! — But old Vernon has had his disappoint¬ 
ment, and will moan over it up to the end. And she ? So it 
appears. I have tried; yes, personally: without effect. In 
other matters I may have influence with her: not in that 
one. She declines. She will live and die Laetitia Dale. 
We are alone : I confess to you, I love the name. It’s an 
old song in my ears. Do not be too ready with a name for 
me. Believe me — I speak from my experience hitherto — 
there is a fatality in these things. I cannot conceal from 
my poor girl that this fatality exists . . .” 

“ Which is the poor girl at present ? ” said Mrs. Mount- 
stuart, cool in a mystification. 

“ And though she will tell you that I have authorized 
and — Clara Middleton — done as much as man can to 
institute the union you suggest, she will own that she is 
conscious of the presence of this — fatality, I call it for 
want of a better title—between us. It drives her in one 
direction, me in another — or would, if I submitted to the 
pressure. She is not the first who has been conscious 
of it.” 

“ Are we laying hold of a third poor girl ? ” said Mrs. 
Mountstuart. “Ah! I remember. And I remember we 
used to call it playing fast and loose in those days, not 
fatality. It is very strange. It may be that you were 
unblushingly courted in those days, and excuseable ; and we 
all supposed . . but away you went for your tour.” 


348 


THE EGOIST 


“ My mothers medical receipt for me. Partially it suc¬ 
ceeded. She was for grand marriages: not I. I could 
make, I could not be, a sacrifice. And then I went in due 
time to Dr. Cupid on my own account. She has the kind 
of attraction . . . But one changes 1 On revient toujours. 
First we begin with a liking: then we give ourselves up to 
the passion for beauty: then comes the serious question of 
suitableness of the mate to match us: and perhaps we 
discover that we were wiser in early youth than somewhat 
later. However, she has beauty. Now, Mrs. Mountstuart, 
you do admire her. Chase the idea of the 4 dainty rogue’ 
out of your view of her: you admire her: she is capti¬ 
vating ; she has a particular charm of her own, nay, she has 
real beauty.” 

Mrs. Mountstuart fronted him to say; “Upon my word, 
my dear Sir Willoughby, I think she has it to such a degree 
that I don’t know the man who could hold out against her 
if she took the field. She is one of the women who are 
dead shots with men. Whether it’s in their tongues or 
their eyes, or it’s an effusion and an atmosphere — whatever 
it is, it’s a spell, another fatality for you! ” 

“ Animal; not spiritual! ” 

“ Oh ! she has n’t the head of Letty Dale.” 

Sir Willoughby allowed Mrs. Mountstuart to pause and 
follow her thoughts. 

“ Dear me! ” she exclaimed. “ I noticed a change in 
Letty Dale last night: and to-day. She looked fresher and 
younger; extremely well: which is not what I can say for 
you, my friend. Fatalizing is not good for the complexion.” 

“Don’t take away my health, pray!” cried Willoughby, 
with a snapping laugh. 

“ Be careful,” said Mrs. Mountstuart. “ You have got a 
sentimental tone. You talk of 4 feelings crushed of old.’ 
It is to a woman, not to a man that you speak, but that sort 
of talk is a way of making the ground slippery. I listen in 
vain for a natural tongue ; and when I don’t hear it, I 
suspect plotting in men. You show your under-teeth too at 
times when you draw in a breath, like a condemned high- 
caste Hindoo my husband took me to see in a jail in Cal¬ 
cutta, to give me some excitement when I was pining for 
England. The creature did it regularly as he breathed; 


MRS. MOUNTSTUART AND SIR WILLOUGHBY 349 


you did it last night, and you have been doing it to-day, as 
if the air cut you to the quick. You have been spoilt. You 
have been too much anointed. What I ’ve just mentioned is 
a sign with me of a settled something on the brain of a 
man.” 

“ The brain ? ” said Sir Willoughby, frowning. 

“Yes, you laugh sourly, to look at,” said she. “Mount- 
stuart told me that the muscles of the mouth betray men 
sooner than the eyes, when they have cause to be uneasy in 
their minds.” 

“But, ma’am, I shall not break my word; I shall not, 
not; I intend, I have resolved to keep it. I do not fatalize, 
let my complexion be black or white. Despite my resem¬ 
blance to a high-class malefactor of the Calcutta prison- 
wards . . 

“ Friend ! friend! you know how I chatter.” 

He saluted her finger-ends. “ Despite the extraordinary 
display of teeth, you will find me go to execution with per¬ 
fect calmness ; with a resignation as good as happiness.” 

“ Like a Jacobite lord under the Georges.” 

“ You have told me that you wept to read of one: like 
him, then. My principles have not changed, if I have. 
When I was younger, I had an idea of a wife who would be 
with me in my thoughts as well as aims: a woman with a 
spirit of romance, and a brain of solid sense. I shall sooner 
or later dedicate myself to a public life; and shall, I sup¬ 
pose, want the counsellor or comforter who ought always to 
be found at home. It may be unfortunate that I have the 
ideal in my head. But I would never make rigorous 
demands for specific qualities. The cruellest thing in the 
world is to set up a living model before a wife, and compel 
her to copy it. In any case, here we are upon the road: the 
die is cast. I shall not reprieve myself. I cannot release 
her. Marriage represents facts, courtship fancies. She will 
be cured by-and-by of that coveting of everything that I do, 
feel, think, dream, imagine . . . ta-ta-ta-ta ad infinitum. 
Lsetitia was invited here to show her the example of a fixed 
character — solid as any concrete substance you would choose 
to build on, and not a whit the less feminine.” 

“ Ta-ta-ta-ta ad infinitum. You need not tell me you have 
a design in all that you do, Willoughby Patterne.” 


350 


THE EGOIST 


“ You smell the autocrat ? Yes, he can mould and govern 
the creatures about him. His toughest rebel is himself! 
If you see Clara . . . You wish to see her, I think you 
said? ” 

“Her behaviour to Lady Busshe last night was queer.” 

“ If you will. She makes a mouth at porcelain. Tou - 
jours la porcelaine ! For me, her pettishness is one of her 
charms, I confess it. Ten years younger, I could not have 
compared them.” 

“Whom?” 

“Lsetitia and Clara.” 

“Sir Willoughby, in any case, to quote you, here we are 
all upon the road, and we must act as if events were going 
to happen; and I must ask her to help me on the subject 
of my wedding-present, for I don’t want to have her making 
mouths at mine, however pretty — and she does it prettily.” 

“ ‘ Another dedicatory offering to the rogue in me ! 9 she 
says of porcelain.” 

“Then porcelain it shall not be. I mean to consult her; 
I have come determined upon a chat with her. I think I 
understand. But she produces false impressions on those 
who don’t know you both. ; I shall have that porcelain 
back,’ says Lady Busshe to me, when we were shaking 
hands last night: ‘ I think,’ says she, ‘ it should have been 
the Willow Pattern.’ And she really said: ‘ he’s in for 
being jilted a second time ! ’ ” 

Sir Willoughby restrained a bound of his body that 
would have sent him up some feet into the air. He felt 
his skull thundered at within. 

“ Rather than that it should fall upon her! ” ejaculated 
he, correcting his resemblance to the high-caste culprit as 
soon as it recurred to him. 

“But you know Lady Busshe,” said Mrs. Mountstuart, 
genuinely solicitous to ease the proud man of his pain. 
She could see through him to the depth of the skin, which 
his fencing sensitiveness vainly attempted to cover as it 
did the heart of him. “ Lady Busshe is nothing without 
her flights, fads, and fancies. She has always insisted that 
you have an unfortunate nose. I remember her saying on 
the day of your majority, it was the nose of a monarch 
destined to lose a throne.” 


MRS. MOUNTSTUART AND SIR WILLOUGHBY 351 


“ Have I ever offended Lady Busshe ? ” 

“ She trumpets you. She carries Lady Culmer with 
her too, and you may expect a visit of nods and hints and 
pots of alabaster. They worship you: you are the hope 
of England in their eyes, and no woman is worthy of you: 
but they are a pair of fatalists, and if you begin upon 
Letty Dale with them, you might as well forbid your 
banns. They will be ail over the country exclaiming on 
predestination and marriages made in heaven.” 

“ Clara and her father! ” cried Sir Willoughby. 

Dr. Middleton and his daughter appeared in the circle 
of shrubs and flowers. 

“Bring her to me, and save me from the polyglot,” said 
Mrs. Mountstuart, in affright at Dr. Middleton’s manner 
of pouring forth into the ears of the downcast girl. 

The leisure he loved that he might debate with his 
genius upon any next step was denied to Willoughby: he 
had to place his trust in the skill with which he had sown 
and prepared Mrs. Mountstuart’s understanding to meet 
the girl — beautiful abhorred that she was! detested dar¬ 
ling ! thing to squeeze to death and throw to the dust, and 
mourn over! 

He had to risk it; and at an hour when Lady Busshe’s 
prognostic grievously impressed his intensely apprehen¬ 
sive nature. 

As it happened that Dr. Middleton’s notion of a disa¬ 
greeable duty in colloquy was to deliver all that he con¬ 
tained, and escape the listening to a syllable of reply, 
Willoughby withdrew his daughter from him opportunely. 

“Mrs. Mountstuart wants you, Clara.” 

“I shall be very happy,” Clara replied, and put on a 
new face. 

An imperceptible nervous shrinking was met by another 
force in her bosom, that pushed her to advance without a 
sign of reluctance. She seemed to glitter. 

She was handed to Mrs. Mountstuart. 

Dr. Middleton laid his hand over Willoughby’s shoulder, 
retiring on a bow before the great lady of the district. 
He blew and said: “ An opposition of female instincts to 
masculine intellect necessarily creates a corresponding 
antagonism of intellect to instinct.” 


352 


THE EGOIST 


“Her answer, sir? Her reasons? Has she named 
any ? ” 

“ The cat,” said Dr. Middleton, taking breath for a sen¬ 
tence, “ that humps her back in the figure of the letter H, 
or a Chinese bridge, has given the dog her answer and her 
reasons, we may presume: but he that undertakes to trans¬ 
late them into human speech might likewise venture to 
propose an addition to the alphabet and a continuation of 
Homer. The one performance would be not more won¬ 
derful than the other. Daughters, Willoughby, daughters! 
Above most human peccancies, I do abhor a breach of faith. 
She will not be guilty of that. I demand a cheerful fulfil¬ 
ment of a pledge: and I sigh to think that I cannot count 
on it without administering a lecture.” 

“She will soon be my care, sir.” 

“ She shall be. Why, she is as good as married. She is 
at the altar. She is in her house. She is — why, where is 
she not ? She has entered the sanctuary. She is out of 
the market. This maenad shriek for freedom would happily 
entitle her to the Eepublican cap — the Phrygian — in 
a revolutionary Parisian procession. To me it has no 
meaning: and but that I cannot credit child of mine with 
mania, I should be in trepidation of her wits.” 

Sir Willoughby’s livelier fears were pacified by the infor¬ 
mation that Clara had simply emitted a cry. Clara had 
once or twice given him cause for starting and considering 
whether to think of her sex differently or condemningly of 
her, yet he could not deem her capable of fully unbosom¬ 
ing herself even to him, and under excitement. His idea 
of the cowardice of girls combined with his ideal of a 
waxwork sex to persuade him that though they are often 
(he had experienced it) wantonly desperate in their acts, 
their tongues are curbed by rosy pudency. And this was 
in his favour. For if she proved speechless and stupid 
with Mrs. Mountstuart, the lady would turn her over, and 
beat her flat, beat her angular, in fine, turn her to any 
shape, despising her, and cordially believe him to be the 
model gentleman of Christendom. She would fill in the 
outlines he had sketched to her of a picture that he had 
small pride in by comparison with his early vision of a 
fortune-favoured, triumphing squire, whose career is like 


MRS. MOUNTSTUART A'SD SIR WILLOUGHBY 353 

the sun’s, intelligibly lordly to all comprehensions. Not 
like your model gentleman, that has to be expounded — a 
thing for abstract esteem! However, it was the choice left 
to him. And an alternative was enfolded in that. Mrs. 
Mountstuart’s model gentleman could marry either one of 
two women, throwing the other overboard. He was bound 
to marry: he was bound to take to himself one of them: 
and whichever one he selected would cast a lustre on his 
reputation. At least she would rescue him from the claws 
of Lady Busshe, and her owl’s hoot of “ Willow Pattern,” 
and her hag’s shriek of “twice jilted.” That flying infant 
Willoughby—his unprotected little incorporeal omni¬ 
present Self (not thought of so much as passionately felt 
for) — would not be scoffed at as the luckless with women. 
A fall indeed from his original conception of his name 
of fame abroad! But Willoughby had the high consolation 
of knowing that others have fallen lower. There is the 
fate of the devils to comfort us, if we are driven hard. 
For one of your pangs another bosom is racked by ten , we 
read in the solacing Book. 

With all these nice calculations at work, Willoughby 
stood above himself, contemplating his active machinery, 
which he could partly criticize but could not stop, in a sin¬ 
gular wonderment at the aims and schemes and tremours 
of one who was handsome, manly, acceptable in the world’s 
eyes: and had he not loved himself most heartily he 
would have been divided to the extent of repudiating that 
urgent and excited half of his being, whose motions ap¬ 
peared as those of a body of insects perpetually erecting 
and repairing a structure of extraordinary pettiness. He 
loved himself too seriously to dwell on the division for more 
than a minute or so. But having seen it, and for the first 
time, as he believed, his passion for the woman causing 
it became surcharged with bitterness, atrabiliar. 

A glance behind him, as he walked away with Dr. Mid¬ 
dleton, showed Clara, cunning creature that she was, airily 
executing her malicious graces in the preliminary courte* 
sies with Mrs. Mountstuart. 


23 


THE EGOIST 


o«34 


CHAPTER XXXV 

MISS MIDDLETON AND MRS. MOUNTSTUART 

“ Sit beside me, fair Middleton,” said the great lady. 

“Gladly,” said Clara, bowing to her title. 

“ I want to sound you, my dear.” 

Clara presented an open countenance with a dim interro 
gation on the forehead. “ Yes ? ” she said submissively. 

“ You were one of my bright faces last night. I was in 
love with you. Delicate vessels ring sweetly to a finger¬ 
nail, and if the wit is true, you answer to it; that I can see, 
and that is what I like. Most of the people one has at a 
table are drums. A rub-a-dub-dub on them is the only way 
to get a sound. When they can be persuaded to do it upon 
one another, they call it conversation.” 

“ Colonel De Craye was very funny.” 

“ Funny, and witty too.” 

“ But never spiteful.” 

“ These Irish or half-irishmen are my taste. If they ’re 
not politicians, mind: I mean Irish gentlemen. I will 
never have another dinner-party without one. Our men’s 
tempers are uncertain. You can’t get them to forget them¬ 
selves. And when the wine is in them the nature comes 
out, and they must be buffetting, and up start politics, and 
good-bye to harmony! My husband, I am sorry to say, was 
one of those who have a long account of ruined dinners 
against them. I have seen him and his friends red as the 
roast and white as the boiled with wrath on a popular topic 
they had excited themselves over, intrinsically not worth a 
snap of the fingers. In London! ” exclaimed Mrs. Mount- 
stuart, to aggravate the charge against her lord in the 
Shades. “ But town or country, the table should be sacred. 
I have heard women say it is a plot on the side of the men 
to teach us our littleness. I don’t believe they have a plot. 
It would be to compliment them on a talent. I believe 
they fall upon one another blindly, simply because they are 
full: which is, we are told, the preparation for the fighting 


MISS MIDDLETON AND MRS. MOUNTSTUART 356 

Englishman. They cannot eat and keep a truce. Did you 
notice that dreadful Mr. Capes ? ” 

“ The gentleman who frequently contradicted papa ? But 
Colonel De Craye was good enough to relieve us.” 

44 How, my dear ? ” 

44 You did not hear him ? He took advantage of an inter¬ 
val when Mr. Capes was breathing after a paean to his 
friend, the Governor — I think—of one of the Presiden¬ 
cies, to say to the lady beside him: 4 He was a wonderful 
administrator and great logician; he married an Anglo- 
Indian widow, and soon after published a pamphlet in 
favour of Suttee.*” 

44 And what did the lady say ? ” 

“ She said, 4 Oh.* ” 

44 Hark at her! And was it heard ? ” 

44 Mr. Capes granted the widow, but declared he had never 
seen the pamphlet in favour of Suttee, and disbelieved in 
it. He insisted that it was to be named Satl. He was 
vehement.” 

44 Now I do remember: — which must have delighted the 
colonel. And Mr. Capes retired from the front upon a 
repetition of ‘in toto, in toto.’ As if 4 in toto ’ were the 
language of a dinner-table! But what will ever teach 
these men ? Must we import Frenchmen to give them an 
example in the art of conversation, as their grandfathers 
brought over marquises to instruct them in salads ? And 
our young men too ! Women have to take to the hunting- 
field to be able to talk with them and be on a par'with their 
grooms. Now, there was Willoughby Patterne, a prince 
among them formerly. Now, did you observe him last 
night ? did you notice how, instead of conversing, instead 
of assisting me — as he was bound to do doubly, owing to 
the defection of Vernon Whitford: a thing I don’t yet com¬ 
prehend — there he sat sharpening his lower lip for cutting 
remarks. And at my best man ! at Colonel De Craye! If 
he had attacked Mr. Capes, with his Governor of Bomby, as 
the man pronounces it, or Colonel Wildjohn and his Protes¬ 
tant Church in Danger, or Sir Wilson Pettifer harping on 
his Monarchical Bepublic, or any other ! No, he preferred 
to De sarcastic upon friend Horace, and he had the worst of 
it. Sarcasm is so silly! What is the gain if he has been 


356 


THE EGOIST 


smart ? People forget the epigram and remember the 
other’s good temper. On that field, my dear, you must 
make up your mind to be beaten by ‘friend Horace.’ I 
have my prejudices and I have my prepossessions, but I 
love good temper, and I love wit, and when I see a man 
possessed of both, I set my cap at him, and there’s my flat 
confession, and highly unfeminine it is.” 

“ Not at all! ” cried Clara. 

“We are one, then.” 

Clara put up a mouth empty of words : she was quite one 
with her. Mrs. Mountstuart pressed her hand. “When 
one does get intimate with a dainty rogue! ” she said. 
“ You forgive me all that, for I could vow that Willoughby 
has betrayed me.” 

Clara looked soft, kind, bright, in turns, and clouded in¬ 
stantly when the lady resumed : “ A friend of my own sex, 
and young, and a close neighbour, is just what I would have 
prayed for. And I ’ll excuse you, my dear, for not being so 
anxious about the friendship of an old woman. But I 
shall be of use to you, you will find. In the first place, I 
never tap for secrets. In the second, I keep them. Thirdly, 
I have some power. And fourth, every young married 
woman has need of a friend like me. Yes, and Lady 
Patterne heading all the county will be the stronger for my 
backing. You don’t look so mighty well pleased, my dear. 
Speak out.” 

“ Dear Mrs. Mountstuart! ” 

“ I tell you, I am very fond of Willoughby, but I saw the 
faults of the boy and see the man’s. He has the pride of a 
king, and it’s a pity if you offend it. He is prodigal in 
generosity, but he can’t forgive. As to his own errors, you 
must be blind to them as a Saint. The secret of him is, that 
he is one of those excessively civilized creatures who aim at 
perfection: and I think he ought to be supported in his con¬ 
ceit of having attained it; for the more men of that class, 
the greater our influence. He excels in manly sports, be¬ 
cause he won’t be excelled in anything, but as men don’t 
comprehend his fineness, he comes to us; and his wife must 
manage him by that key. You look down at the idea of 
manageing. It has to be done. One thing you may be assured 
ofi he will be proud of you. His wife won’t be very much 


MISS MIDDLETON AND MRS. MOUNTSTUART 357 

enamoured of herself if she is not the happiest woman in 
the world. You will have the best horses, the best dresses, 
the finest jewels, in England; and an incomparable cook. 
The house will be changed the moment you enter it as Lady 
Patterne. And, my dear, just where he is, with all his 
graces, deficient of attraction, yours will tell. The sort of 
Othello he would make, or Leontes, I don’t know, and none 
of us ever needs to know. My impression is, that if even 
a shadow of a suspicion flitted across him, he is a sort of 
man to double-dye himself in guilt by way of vengeance in 
anticipation of an imagined offence. Not uncommon with 
men. I have heard strange stories of them : and so will 
you in your time to come, but not from me. No young 
woman shall ever be the sourer for having been my friend. 
One word of advice now we are on the topic : never play at 
counter-strokes with him. He will be certain to outstroke 
you, and you will be driven farther than you meant to go. 
They say we beat men at that game, and so we do, at the 
cost of beating ourselves. And if once we are started, it is 
a race-course ending on a precipice — over goes the winner. 
We must be moderately slavish to keep our place; which is 
given us in appearance; but appearances make up a remark¬ 
ably large part of life, and far the most comfortable, so long 
as we are discreet at the right moment. He is a man whose 
pride, when hurt, would run his wife to perdition to solace 
it. If he married a troublesome widow, his pamphlet on 
Suttee would be out within the year. Vernon Whitford 
would receive instructions about it the first frosty moon. 
You like Miss Dale ? ” 

“ I think I like her better than she likes me,” said Clara. 

“ Have you never warmed together ? ” 

“1 have tried it. She is not one bit to blame. I can see 
how it is that she misunderstands me; or justly condemns 
me, perhaps I should say.” 

“ The hero of two women must die and be wept over in 
common before they can appreciate one another. You are 
not cold?” 

“ No.” 

“ You shuddered, my dear.” 

“ Did I ? ” 

“ I do sometimes. Feet will be walking over one’s grave, 


358 


THE EGOIST 


wherever it lies. Be sure of this: Willoughby Patterne is 
a man of unimpeachable honour.” 

“ I do not doubt it.” 

“ He means to be devoted to you. He has been accustomed 
to have women hanging around him like votive offerings.” 

a I . . . !” 

t: You cannot: of course not: any one could see that at a 
glance. You are all the sweeter to me for not being tame. 
Marriage cures a multitude of indispositions.” 

“ Oh ! Mrs. Mountstuart, will you listen to me ? ” 

“ Presently. Don’t threaten me with confidences. Elo¬ 
quence is a terrible thing in woman. I suspect, my dear, 
that we both know as much as could be spoken.” 

“ You hardly suspect the truth, I fear.” 

“ Let me tell you one thing about jealous men — when 
they are not blackamoors married to disobedient daughters. 
I speak of our civil creature of the drawing-rooms : and 
lovers, mind, not husbands: two distinct species, married 
or not:—they ’re rarely given to jealousy unless they are 
flighty themselves. The jealousy fixes them. They have 
only to imagine that we are for some fun likewise and they 
grow as deferential as my footman, as harmless as the sports¬ 
man whose gun has burst. Ah ! my fair Middleton, am I 
pretending to teach you ? You have read him his lesson, and 
my table suffered for it last night, but I bear no rancour.” 

" You bewilder me, Mrs. Mountstuart.” 

“ Not if I tell you that you have driven the poor man to 
try whether it would be possible for him to give you up.” 

“ I have ? ” 

“ Well, and you are successful.” 

“I am?” 

“ Jump, my dear! ” 

“ He will ? ” 

“ When men love stale instead of fresh, withered better 
than blooming, excellence in the abstract rather than the 
palpable. With their idle prate of feminine intellect, and a 
grotto nymph, and — and a mother of Gracchi! Why, he 
must think me dazed with admiration of him to talk to me ! 
One listens, you know. And he is one of the men who cast 
a kind of physical spell on you while he has you by the ear, 
until you begin to think of it by talking to somebody else. 


MISS MIDDLETON AND MRS. MOUNTSTUART 359 


I suppose there are clever people who do see deep into the 
breast while dialogue is in progress. One reads of them. 
No, my dear, you have very cleverly managed to show him 
that it is n’t at all possible: he can’t. And the real cause 
for alarm in my humble opinion is lest your amiable foil 
should have been a trifle, as he would say, deceived, too 
much in earnest, led too far. One may reprove him for not 
being wiser, but men won’t learn without groaning, that 
they are simply weapons taken up to be put down when 
done with. Leave it to me to compose him. —Willoughby 
can’t give you up. I’m certain he has tried; his pride has 
been horribly wounded. You are shrewd, and he has had his 
lesson. If these little rufllings don’t come before marriage 
they come after; so it’s not time lost; and it’s good to be 
able to look back on them. You are very white, my child.” 

“ Can you, Mrs. Mountstuart, can you think I would be 
so heartlessly treacherous ? ” 

“ Be honest, fair Middleton, and answer me: Can you say 
you had not a corner of an idea of producing an effect on 
Willoughby ? ” 

Clara checked the instinct of her tongue to defend her 
reddening cheeks, with a sense that she was disintegrating 
and crumbling; but she wanted this lady for a friend, and 
she had to submit to the conditions, and be red and silent. 

Mrs. Mountstuart examined her leisurely. 

“That will do. Conscience blushes. One knows it by 
the outer conflagration. Don’t be hard on yourself: there 
you are in the other extreme. That blush of yours would 
count with me against any quantity of evidence — all the 
Crooklyns in the kingdom. You lost your purse.” 

“I discovered that it was lost this morning.” 

“ Flitch has been here with it. Willoughby has it. You 
will ask him for it; he will demand payment: you will be 
a couple of yards’ length or so of cramoisy: and there ends 
the episode, nobody killed, only a poor man melancholy- 
wounded, and I must offer him my hand to mend him, vow¬ 
ing to prove to him that Suttee was properly abolished. 
Well, and now to business. I said I wanted to sound you. 
You have been overdone with porcelain. Poor Lady Busshe 
is in despair at your disappointment. Now, I mean my 
wedding-present to be to your taste.” 


360 


THE EGOIS1 


“ Madam!” 

“ Who is the madam you are imploring ? ” 

“ Dear Mrs. Mountstuart! ” 

“ Well ? ” 

“ I shall fall in your esteem. Perhaps you will help me. 
No one else can. I am a prisoner : I am compelled to con¬ 
tinue this imposture. Oh! I shun speaking much: you 
object to it and I dislike it: but I must endeavour to explain 
to you that I am unworthy of the position you think a 
proud one.” 

“ Tut-tut; we are all unworthy, cross our arms, bow our 
heads; and accept the honours. Are you playing humble 
handmaid ? What an old organ-tune that is ! Well ? 
Give me reasons.” 

“ I do not wish to marry.” 

“ He ’s the great match of the county! ” 

“ I cannot marry him.” 

“ Why, you are at the church-door with him! Cannot 
marry him ? ” 

“ It does not bind me.” 

“ The church-door is as binding as the altar to an honour¬ 
able girl. What have you been about ? Since I am in for 
confidences, half ones won’t do. We must have honourable 
young women as well as men of honour. You can’t imagine 
he is to be thrown over now, at this hour ? What have you 
against him ? come! ” 

“ I have found that I do not . . 

“ What ? ” 

“Love him.” 

Mrs. Mountstuart grimaced transiently. “That is no 
answer. The cause ! ” she said. “ What has he done ?” 
“Nothing.” 

“ And when did you discover this nothing ? ” 

“ By degrees : unknown to myself ; suddenly.” 

“ Suddenly and by degrees ? I suppose it’s useless to ask 
for a head. But if all this is true, you ought not to be 
here.” 

“ I wish to go ; I am unable.” 

“ Have you had a scene together ? ” 

" I have expressed my wish.” 
u In roundabout ? — girl’s English ? n 


MISS MIDDLETON AND MRS. MOUNTSTUART 361 

“ Quite clearly. Oh ! very clearly.” 

“ Have you spoken to your father ? ” 

“I have.” 

“ And what does Dr. Middleton say ? ” 

“ It is incredible to him.” 

“Tome too! I can understand little differences, little 
whims, caprices : we don’t settle into harness for a tap on 
the shoulder, as a man becomes a knight: but to break and 
bounce away from an unhappy gentleman at the church-door 
is either madness or it’s one of the things without a name. 
You think you are quite sure of yourself ? ” 

“I am so sure, that I look back with regret on the time 
when I was not.” 

“ But you were in love with him.” 

“ I was mistaken.” 

“No love ?” 

“ I have none to give.” 

“ Dear me ! — Yes, yes, but that tone of sorrowful convic¬ 
tion is often a trick, it's not new: and I know that assump¬ 
tion of plain sense to pass off a monstrosity.” Mrs. Mount- 
stuart struck her lap : “ Soh ! but I’ve had to rack my brain 
for it: feminine disgust ? You have been hearing imputa¬ 
tions on his past life ? moral character ? No ? Circum¬ 
stances might make him behave unkindly, not unhand¬ 
somely : and we have no claim over a man’s past, or it’s 
too late to assert it. What is the case ? ” 

“We are quite divided.” 

“ Nothing in the way of . . . nothing green-eyed ? ” 

“ Far from that! ” 

“ Then, name it.” 

“We disagree.” 

“ Many a very good agreement is founded on disagreeing. 
It’s to be regretted that you are not portionless. If you had 
been, you would have made very little of disagreeing. You 
are just as much bound in honour as if you had the ring on 
your finger.” 

“ In honour! But I appeal to his, I am no wife for him.” 
“ But if he insists, you consent ? ” 

“ I appeal to reason. Is it, madam . . .” 

“ But, I say, if he insists, you consent! ” 

“ He will insist upon his own misery as well as mine.” 


362 


THE EGOIST 


Mrs. Mountstuart rocked herself. “ My poor Sir Wil¬ 
loughby ! What a fate ! — And I who took you for a clever 
girl! Why, I have been admiring your management of 
him! And here am I bound to take a lesson from Lady 
Busshe. My dear good Middleton, don’t let it be said that 
Lady Busshe saw deeper than I! I put some little vanity 
in it, I own: I won’t conceal it. She declares that when she 
sent her present — I don’t believe her — she had a premoni¬ 
tion that it would come back. Surely you won’t justify the 
extravagances of a woman without common reverence: — for 
anatomize him as we please to ourselves, he is a splendid 
man (and I did it chiefly to encourage and come at you). 
We don’t often behold such a lordly-looking man: so con¬ 
versable too when he feels at home ; a picture of an English 
gentleman! The very man we want married for our neigh¬ 
bourhood ! A woman who can openly talk of expecting him 
to be twice jilted! You shrink. It is repulsive. It would 
be incomprehensible: except, of course, to Lady Busshe, 
who rushed to one of her violent conclusions and became a 
prophetess. Conceive a woman imagining it could happen 
twice to the same man! I am not sure she did not send the 
identical present that arrived and returned once before: you 
know, the Durham engagement. She told me last night she 
had it back. I watched her listening very suspiciously to 
Professor Crooklyn. My dear, it is her passion to foretell 
disasters — her passion! And when they are confirmed, she 
triumphs, of course. We shall have her domineering over 
us with sapient nods at every trifle occurring. The county 
will be unendureable. Unsay it, my Middleton! And don’t 
answer like an oracle because I do all the talking. Pour out 
to me. You ’ll soon come to a stop and find the want of 
reason in the want of words. I assure you that’s true.— 
Let me have a good gaze at you. No,” said Mrs. Mount¬ 
stuart, after posturing herself to peruse Clara’s features, 
“ brains you have : one can see it by the nose and the mouth. 
I could vow you are the girl I thought you; you have your 
wits on tiptoe. How of the heart ? ” 

“ None,” Clara sighed. 

The sigh was partly voluntary, though unforced; as one 
may with ready sincerity act a character that our own 
only through sympathy. 


MISS MIDDLETON AND MRS. MOUNTSTTTART 363 


Mrs. Mountstuart felt the extra weight in the young lady’s 
falling breath. There was no necessity for a deep sigh over 
an absence of heart or confession of it. If Clara did not 
love the man to whom she was betrothed, sighing about it 
signified — what ? some pretence: and a pretence is the 
cloak of a secret. Girls do not sigh in that way with com¬ 
passion for the man they have no heart for, unless at the 
same time they should be oppressed by the knowledge or 
dread of having a heart for some one else. As a rule, they 
have no compassion to bestow on him : you might as reason¬ 
ably expect a soldier to bewail the enemy he strikes in 
action: they must be very disengaged to have it. And 
supposing a show of the thing to be exhibited, when it has 
not been worried out of them, there is a reserve in the 
background : they are pitying themselves under a mask of 
decent pity of their wretch. 

So ran Mrs. Mountstuart’s calculations, which were like 
her suspicion, coarse and broad, not absolutely incorrect, 
but not of an exact measure with the truth. That pin’s 
head of the truth is rarely hit by design. The search after 
it of the professionally penetrative in the dark of a bosom 
may bring it forth by the heavy knocking all about the 
neighbourhood that we call good guessing, but it does not 
come out clean; other matter adheres to it; and being 
more it is less than truth. The unadulterate is to be had 
only by faith in it or by waiting for it. 

A lover! thought the sagacious dame. There was no 
lover: some love there was : or rather, there was a prepara¬ 
tion of the chamber, with no lamp yet lighted. 

“Do you positively tell me you have no heart for the 
position of first lady of the county? ” said Mrs. Mountstuart. 

Clara’s reply was firm : “ None whatever.” 

“ My dear, I will believe you on one condition. — Look at 
me. You have eyes. If you are for mischief, you are 
armed for it. But how much better, when you have won a 
prize, to settle down and wear it! Lady Patterne will have 
entire occupation for her flights and whimsies in leading the 
county. And the man, surely the man — he behaved badly 
last night: but a beauty like this,” she pushed a finger at 
Clara’s cheek, and doated a half instant, “you have the very 
beauty to break in an ogre’s temper. And the man is as 


864 


THE EGOIST 


governable as be is presentable. You have the beauty the 
French call — no, it’s the beauty of a queen of elves : one 
sees them lurking about you, one here, one there. Smile 
— they dance: be doleful — they hang themselves. No, 
there’s not a trace of satanic; at least, not yet. And 
come, come, my Middleton, the man is a man to be proud 
of. You can send him into Parliament to wear off his 
humours. To my thinking, he has a fine style: conscious ? 
I never thought so before last night. I can’t guess what 
has happened to him recently. He was once a young 
Grand Monarque. He was really a superb young English 
gentleman. Have you been wounding him ?” 

“It is my misfortune to be obliged to wound him,” said 
Clara. 

“ Quite needlessly, my child, for marry him you must.” 

Clara’s bosom rose: her shoulders rose too, narrowing, 
and her head fell slightly back. 

Mrs. Mountstuart exclaimed: “But the scandal! You 
would never, never think of following the example of that 
Durham girl? — whether she was provoked to it by jealousy 
or not. It seems to have gone so astonishingly far with you 
in a very short time, that one is alarmed as to where you 
will stop. Your look just now was downright revulsion.” 

“I fear it is. It is. I am past my own control. Dear 
madam, you have my assurance that I will not behave 
scandalously or dishonourably. What I would entreat of 
you, is to help me. I know this of myself: I am not the 
best of women. I am impatient, wickedly. I should be no 
good wife. Feelings like mine teach me unhappy things of 
myself.” 

“ Rich, handsome, lordly, influential, brilliant health, fine 
estates,” Mrs. Mountstuart enumerated in petulant accents 
as they started across her mind some of Sir Willoughby’s 
attributes for the attraction of the soul of woman. “ I sup¬ 
pose you wish me to take you in earnest ? ” 

“ I appeal to you for help.” 

“ What help ? ” 

“Persuade him of the folly of pressing me to keep my 
word.” 

“ I will believe you, my dear Middleton, on one condi¬ 
tion :—your talk of no heart is nonsense. A change like 


MISS MIDDLETON AND MRS. MOUNTSTUART 365 


this, if one is to believe in the change, occurs through the 
heart, not because there is none. Don’t you see that ? 
But if you want me for a friend, you must not sham stupid. 
It’s bad enough in itself: the imitation’s horrid. You 
have to be honest with me, and answer me right out. You 
came here on this visit intending to marry Willoughby 
Patterne.” 

“Yes.” 

“ And gradually you suddenly discovered, since you came 
here, that you did not intend it, if you could find a means 
of avoiding it.” 

“ Oh! madam, yes, it is true.” 

“Now comes the test. And, my lovely Middleton, your 
flaming cheeks won’t suffice for me this time. The old ser¬ 
pent can blush like an innocent maid on occasion. You are 
to speak, and you are to tell me in six words why that 
was: and don’t waste one on ‘madam,’ or ‘Oh! Mrs. 
Mountstuart.’ Why did you change ? ” 

“I came . . . when I came I was in some doubt. In¬ 
deed I speak the truth. I found I could not give him the 
admiration he has, I daresay, a right to expect. I turned 
— it surprised me: it surprises me now. But so com¬ 
pletely ! So that to think of marrying him is . . 

“Defer the simile,” Mrs. Mountstuart interposed. “If 
you hit on a clever one, you will never get the better of it. 
Now, by just as much as you have outstripped my limita¬ 
tion of words to you, you show me you are dishonest.” 

“ I could make a vow.” 

“ You would forswear yourself.” 

“ Will you help me ? ” 

“If you are perfectly ingenuous, I may try.” 

“ Dear lady, what more can I say ? ” 

“ It may be difficult. You can reply to a catechism.’* 

“ I shall have your help ? ” 

“Well, yes; though I don’t like stipulations between 
friends. There is no man living to whom you could will¬ 
ingly give your hand ? That is my question. I cannot 
possibly take a step unless I know. Reply briefly: there is 
or there is not.” 

Clara sat back with bated breath, mentally taking the 
leap into the abyss, realizing it, and the cold prudence of 


366 


THE EGOIST 


abstention, and the delirium of the confession. Was there 
such a man ? It resembled freedom to think there was: to 
avow it promised freedom. 

“ Oh ! Mrs. Mountstuart.” 

“Well?” 

“ You will help me ? ” 

“Upon my word, I shall begin to doubt your desire for 
it.” 

“ Willingly give my hand, madam ? ” 

“For shame ! And with wits like yours, can’t you per¬ 
ceive where hesitation in answering such a question lands 
you ? ” 

“ Dearest lady, will you give me your hand ? may I 
whisper ? ” 

“ You need not whisper: I won’t look.” 

Clara’s voice trembled on a tense chord. 

“ There is one . . . compared with him I feel my insig¬ 
nificance. If I could aid him.” 

“What necessity have you to tell me more than that 
there is one ? ” 

“ Ah, madam, it is different: not as you imagine. You 
bid me be scrupulously truthful: I am : I wish you to know 
the different kind of feeling it is from what might be sus¬ 
pected from ... a confession. To give my hand, is beyond 
any thought I have ever encouraged. If you had asked me 
whether there is one whom I admire — yes, I do. I cannot 
help admiring a beautiful and brave self-denying nature. It 
is one whom you must pity, and to pity casts you beneath 
him: for you pity him because it is his nobleness that has 
been the enemy of his fortunes. He lives for others.” 

Her voice was musically thrilling in that low muted tone 
of the very heart, impossible to deride or disbelieve. 

Mrs. Mountstuart set her head nodding on springs. 

“ Is he clever ? ” 

“Very.” 

“ He talks well ? ” 

« Yes.” 

“ Handsome ? ” 

“ He might be thought so.” 

“ Witty ? ” 

“ I think he is.” 


mSS MIDDLETON AND MRS. MOUNTSTUART 367 

“Gay, cheerful?” 

“In his manner.” 

“ Why, the man would be a mountebank if he adopted any 
other. And poor ? ” 

“ He is not wealthy.” 

Mrs. Mountstuart preserved a lengthened silence, but 
nipped Clara’s fingers once or twice to reassure her without 
approving. “ Of course he’s poor,” she said at last; “ directly 
the reverse of what you could have, it must be. Well, my 
fair Middleton, I can’t say you have been dishonest. I ’ll 
help you as far as I’m able. How, it is quite impossible to 
tell. We’re in the mire. The best way seems to me, to get 
this pitiable angel to cut some ridiculous capers and present 
you another view of him. I don’t believe in his innocence. 
He knew you to be a plighted woman.” 

“ He has not once by word or sign hinted a disloyalty.” 

“ Then how do you know . . . ? ” 

“ I do not know.” 

“ He is not the cause of your wish to break your engage¬ 
ment ? ” 

“Ho.” 

“ Then you have succeeded in just telling me nothing. 
What is ? ” 

“Ah! madam.” 

“You would break your engagement purely because the 
admirable creature is in existence ? ” 

Clara shook her head : she could not say: she was dizzy. 
She had spoken out more than she had ever spoken to her¬ 
self : and in doing so she had cast herself a step beyond the 
line she dared to contemplate. 

“ I won’t detain you any longer,” said Mrs. Mountstuart. 
“ The more we learn, the more we are taught that we are 
not so wise as we thought we were. I have to go to school 
to Lady Busshe! I really took you for a very clever girl. 
If you change again, you will notify the important circum¬ 
stance to me, I trust.” 

“ I will,” said Clara, and no violent declaration of the im¬ 
possibility of her changeing again would have had such an 
effect on her hearer. 

Mrs. Mountstuart scanned her face for a new reading of 
it to match with her later impressions. 


368 


THE EGOIST 


“I am to do as I please with the knowledge I have 
gained ? ” 

“ I am utterly in your hands, madam.” 

“ I have not meant to be unkind.” 

“ You have not been unkind ; I could embrace you.” 

“ I am rather too shattered, and kissing won’t put me 
together. I laughed at Lady Busshe ! No wonder you went 
off like a rocket with a disappointing bouquet when I told 
you you had been successful with poor Sir Willoughby 
and he could not give you up. I noticed that. A woman 
like Lady Busshe, always prying for the lamentable, 
would have required no further enlightenment. Has he 
a temper ? ” 

Clara did not ask her to signalize the person thus abruptly 
obtruded. 

“ He has faults,” she said. 

“There’s an end to Sir Willoughby, then! Though I 
don’t say he will give you up even when he hears the worst, 
if he must hear it, as for his own sake he should. And I 
won’t say he ought to give you up. He ’ll be the pitiable 
angel if he does. For you — but you don’t deserve compli¬ 
ments ; they would be immoral. You have behaved badly, 
badly, badly. I have never had such a right-about-face in 
my life. You will deserve the stigma: you will be notorious : 
you will be called Number Two. Think of that! Not even 
original! We will break the conference, or I shall twaddle 
to extinction. I think I heard the luncheon bell.” 

“ It rang.” 

“ You don’t look fit for company, but you had better 
come.” 

“Oh! yes : every day it’s the same.” 

“ Whether you ’re in my hands or I’m in yours, we ’re a 
couple of arch-conspirators against the peace of the family 
whose table we ’re sitting at, and the more we rattle the viler 
we are, but we must do it to ease our minds.” 

Mrs. Mountstuart spread the skirts of her voluminous 
dress, remarking further : “At a certain age our teachers 
are young people : we learn by looking backward. It speaks 
highly for me that I have not called you mad.—Full of 
faults, goodish-looking, not a bad talker, cheerful, poorish; 
— and she prefers that to this! ” the great lady exclaimed 


MISS MIDDLETON AND MRS. MOUNTSTUART 369 

m her reverie while emerging from the circle of shrubs upon 
a view of the Hall. 

Colonel De Craye advanced to her; certainly good-looking, 
certainly cheerful, by no means a bad talker, nothing of a 
Croesus, and variegated with faults. 

His laughing smile attacked the irresolute hostility of her 
mien, confident as the sparkle of sunlight in a breeze. The 
effect of it on herself angered her on behalf of Sir Wil¬ 
loughby’s bride. 

“ Good morning, Mrs. Mountstuart; I believe I am the 
last to greet you.” 

“ And how long do you remain here, Colonel De Craye ? ” 

“ I kissed earth when T arrived, like the Norman William, 
and consequently I’ve an attachment to the soil, ma’am.” 

“ You are not going to take possession of it, I suppose ?” 

“ A handful would satisfy me ! ” 

“ You play the Conqueror pretty much, I have heard. 
But property is held more sacred than in the times of the 
Norman William.” 

“And speaking of property, Miss Middleton, your purse 
is found,” he said. 

“ I know it is,” she replied, as unaffectedly as Mrs. Mount¬ 
stuart could have desired, though the ingenuous air of the 
girl incensed her somewhat. 

Clara passed on. 

“You restore purses,” observed Mrs. Mountstuart. 

Her stress on the word, and her look, thrilled De Craye : 
for there had been a long conversation between the young 
lady and the dame. 

“It was an article that dropped and was not stolen,” 
said he. 

“Barely sweet enough to keep, then ! ” 

“ I think I could have felt to it like poor Flitch, the 
fiyman, who was the finder.” 

“If you are conscious of these temptations to appropriate 
what is not your own, you should quit the neighbourhood.” 

“ And do it elsewhere ? But that’s not virtuous counsel.” 

“ And I’m not counselling in the interests of your virtue, 
Colonel De Craye.” 

“ And I dared for a moment to hope that you were, 
ma’am,” he said, ruefully drooping. 


370 


THE EGOIST 


They were close to the dining-room window, and Mrs. 
Mountstuart preferred the terminating of a dialogue that 
did not promise to leave her features the austerely iron cast 
with which she had commenced it. She was under the spell 
of gratitude for his behaviour yesterday evening at her 
dinner-table; she could not be very severe. 


CHAPTER XXXVI 

ANIMATED CONVERSATION AT A LUNCHEON-TABLE 

Vernon was crossing the hall to the dining-room as Mrs. 
Mountstuart stepped in. She called to him: “ Are the 
champions reconciled ? ” 

He replied: “ Hardly that, but they have consented to 
meet at an altar to offer up a victim to the Gods, in the shape 
of modern poetic imitations of the classical.” 

“ That seems innocent enough. The Professor has not 
been anxious about his chest ? ” 

“ He recollects his cough now and then.” 

“ You must help him to forget it.” 

“ Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer are here,” said Vernon, 
not supposing it to be a grave announcement until the effect 
of it on Mrs. Mountstuart admonished him. 

She dropped her voice : “ Engage my fair friend for one 
of your walks the moment we rise from table. You may 
have to rescue her; but do. I mean it.” 

“ She ’s a capital walker,” Vernon remarked in simpleton 
style. 

“ There ’s no necessity for any of your pedestrian feats,” 
Mrs. Mountstuart said, and let him go, turning to Colonel 
De Craye to prouounce an encomium on him : “The most 
open-minded man I know! Warranted to do perpetual 
service and no mischief. If you were all . . . instead of 
catching at every prize you covet! Yes, you would have 
your reward for unselfishness, I assure you. Yes, and where 
you seek it! That is what none of you men will believe.” 



CONVERSATION AT A LUNCHEON-TABLE 371 

“ When you behold me in your own livery! ” cried the 
colonel. 

“ Do I ? ” said she, dallying with a half-formed design to 
be confidential. “ How is it one is always tempted to 
address you in the language of innuendo ? I can’t guess.” 

“ Except that as a dog does n’t comprehend good English 
we naturally talk bad to him.” 

The great lady was tickled. Who could help being 
amused by this man ? And after all, if her fair Middleton 
chose to be a fool, there could be no gainsaying her, sorry 
though poor Sir Willoughby’s friends must feel for him. 

She tried not to smile. 

“ You are too absurd. Or a baby, you might have added.” 

“ I had n’t the daring.” 

“I’ll tell you what, Colonel De Craye, I shall end by 
falling in love with you; and without esteeming you, I 
fear.” 

“The second follows as surely as the flavour upon a 
draught of Bacchus, if you’ll but toss off the glass, ma’am.” 

“We women, sir, think it should be first.” 

“ ’T is to transpose the seasons, and give October the 
blossom, and April the apple, and no sweet one ! Esteem’s 
a mellow thing that comes after bloom and fire, like an 
evening at home; because if it went before it would have 
no father and couldn’t hope for progeny; for there’d be no 
nature in the business. So please, ma’am, keep to the 
original order, and you ’ll be nature’s child and I the most 
blest of mankind.” 

“ Really, were I fifteen years younger. I am not so 
certain ... I might try and make you harmless.” 

“Draw the teeth of the lamb so long as you pet him ! ” 

“ I challenged you, colonel, and I won’t complain of your 
pitch. But now lay your wit down beside your candour 
and descend to an every-day level with me for a minute.” 

“ Is it innuendo! ” 

“Ho, though I daresay it would be easier for you to 
respond to, if it were.” 

“ I’m the straightforwardest of men at a word of com¬ 
mand.” 

“This is a whisper. Be alert as you were last night. 
Shuffle the table well. A little liveliness will do it. I 


372 


THE EGOIST 


don’t imagine malice, but there’s curiosity, which is often 
as bad, and not so lightly foiled. We have Lady Busshe 
and Lady Culmer here.” 

“ To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky !” 

“ Well, then, can you fence with broomsticks ? ” 

“ I have nad a bout with them in my time.” 

“ They are terribly direct.” 

“They ‘give point,’ as Napoleon commanded his cavalr) 
to do.” 

“ You must help me to ward it.” 

“ They will require variety in the conversation.” 

“Constant. You are an angel of intelligence, and if 1 
have the judgeing of you, I ’m afraid you ’ll be allowed to 
pass, in spite of the scandal above. Open the door; I 
don’t unbonnet.” 

De Craye threw the door open. 

Lady Busshe was at that moment saying: “ And are we 
indeed to have you for a neighbour, Dr. Middleton ? ” 

The Rev. Doctor’s reply was drowned by the new 
arrivals. 

“I thought you had forsaken us,” observed Sir Wil¬ 
loughby to Mrs. Mountstuart. 

“ And run away with Colonel De Craye ? I’m too 
weighty, my dear friend. Besides, I have not looked at 
the wedding-presents yet.” 

“ The very object of our call! ” exclaimed Lady Culmer. 

“ I have to confess I am in dire alarm about mine,” Lady 
Busshe nodded across the table at Clara. “ Oh! you may 
shake your head, but I would rather hear a rough truth 
than the most complimentary evasion.” 

“ How would you define a rough truth, Dr. Middleton ? ” 
said Mrs. Mountstuart. 

Like the trained warrior who is ready at all hours for the 
trumpet to arms, Dr. Middleton wakened up for judicial 
allocution in a trice. 

“ A rough truth, madam, I should define to be that de¬ 
scription of truth which is not imparted to mankind with¬ 
out a powerful impregnation of the roughness of the 
teller.” 

“ It is a rough truth, ma’am, that the world is composed 
of fools, and that the exceptions are knaves,” Professor 


CONVERSATION AT A LUNCHEON-TABLE 373 

Crooklyn furnished the example avoided by the Rev. 
Doctor. 

“Not to precipitate myself into the jaws of the first 
definition, which strikes me as being as happy as Jonah’s 
whale, that could carry probably the most learned man of 
his time inside without the necessity of digesting him,” 
said De Craye, “ a rough truth is a rather strong charge of 
universal nature for the firing off of a modicum of personal 
fact.” 

“ It is a rough truth that Plato is Moses atticizing,” said 
Vernon to Dr. Middleton, to keep the diversion alive. 

“ And that Aristotle had the globe under his cranium,” 
rejoined the Rev. Doctor. 

“ And that the Moderns live on the Ancients.” 

“ And that not one in ten thousand can refer to the par¬ 
ticular treasury he filches.” 

“ The Art of our days is a revel of rough truth,” remarked 
Professor Crooklyn. 

“ And the literature has laboriously mastered the adjec¬ 
tive, wherever it may be in relation to the noun,” Dr. 
Middleton added. 

“ Orson’s first appearance at Court was in the figure of a 
rough truth, causing the Maids of Honour, accustomed 
to Tapestry Adams, astonishment and terror,” said De 
Craye. 

That he might not be left out of the sprightly play, Sir 
Willoughby levelled a lance at the quintain, smiling on 
Laetitia: “ In fine, caricature is rough truth.” 

She said: “ Is one end of it, and realistic directness is 
the other.” 

He bowed : “ The palm is yours.” 

Mrs. Mountstuart admired herself as each one trotted 
forth in turn characteristically, with one exception unaware 
of the aid which was being rendered to a distressed damsel 
wretchedly incapable of decent hypocrisy. Her intrepid 
lead had shown her hand to the colonel and drawn the 
enemy at a blow. 

Sir Willoughby’s “in fine,” however, did not please her: 
still less did his lackadaisical Lothario-like bowing and 
smiling to Miss Dale: and he perceived it and was hurt. 
For how, carrying his tremendous load, was he to compete 


374 


THE EGOIST 


with these unhandicapped men in the game of nonsense she 
had such a fondness for starting at a table ? He was 
further annoyed to hear Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel 
Patterne agree together, that “ caricature ” was the final 
word of the definition. Relatives should know better than 
to deliver these awards to us in public. 

“ Well! ” quoth Lady Busshe, expressive of stupefaction 
at the strange dust she had raised. 

“ Are they on view, Miss Middleton ? ” inquired Lady 
Culmer. 

“ There’s a regiment of us on view and ready for in¬ 
spection,” Colonel De Craye bowed to her, but she would 
not be foiled. “ Miss Middleton’s admirers are always on 
view,” said he. 

“ Are they to be seen ? ” said Lady Busshe. 

Clara made her face a question, with a laudable smooth¬ 
ness. 

“ The wedding-presents,” Lady Culmer explained. 

"No.” 

“ Otherwise, my dear, we are in danger of duplicating and 
triplicating and quadruplicating, not at all to the satisfaction 
of the bride.” 

“ But there’s a worse danger to encounter in the 1 on view,’ 
my lady,” said De Craye; “ and that’s the magnetic at¬ 
traction a display of wedding-presents is sure to have for 
the ineffable burglar, who must have a nuptial soul in him, 
for wherever there’s that collection on view, he’s never a 
league off. And ’t is said he knows a lady’s dressing-case 
presented to her on the occasion, fifteen years after the 
event.” 

“ As many as fifteen ? ” said Mrs. Mountstuart. 

“ By computation of the police. And if the presents are 
on view, dogs are of no use, nor bolts, nor bars : — he’s worse 
than Cupid. The only protection to be found, singular as it 
may be thought, is in a couple of bottles of the oldest 
Jamaica rum in the British Isles.” 

“ Rum ? ” cried Lady Busshe. 

“The liquor of the Royal Navy, my lady. And with 
your permission, I ’ll relate the tale in proof of it. I had a 
friend engaged to a young lady, niece of an old sea-captain 
of the old school, the Benbow school, the wooden leg and 


CONVERSATION AT A LUNCHEON-TABLE 875 

pigtail school; a perfectly salt old gentleman with a 
pickled tongue, and a dash of brine in every deed he com¬ 
mitted. He looked rolled over to you by the last wave on 
the shore, sparkling: he was Neptune’s own for humour. 
And when his present to the bride was opened, sure enough 
there lay a couple of bottles of the oldest Jamaica rum in 
the British Isles, born before himself, and his father to 
boot. ’T is a fabulous spirit I beg you to believe in, my 
lady, the sole merit of the story being its portentous ve¬ 
racity. The bottles were tied to make them appear twins, as 
they both had the same claim to seniority. And there was 
a label on them, telling their great age, to maintain their 
identity. They were in truth a pair of patriarchal bottles 
rivalling many of the biggest houses in the kingdom for 
antiquity. They would have made the donkey that stood 
between the two bundles of hay look at them with obliq¬ 
uity : supposing him to have, for an animal, a rum taste, 
and a turn for hilarity. Wonderful old bottles I So, on 
the label, just over the date, was written large: Uncle 
Benjamin’s Wedding-Present to his niece Bessy. Poor 
Bessy shed tears of disappointment and indignation enough 
to float the old gentleman on his native element, ship and 
all. She vowed it was done curmudgeonly to vex her, 
because her uncle hated wedding-presents and had grunted 
at the exhibition of cups and saucers, and this and that 
beautiful service, and epergnes and inkstands, mirrors, 
knives and forks, dressing-cases, and the whole mighty 
category. She protested, she flung herself about, she 
declared those two ugly bottles should not join the exhibi¬ 
tion in the dining-room, where it was laid out for days, and 
the family ate their meals where they could, on the walls, 
like flies. But there was also Uncle Benjamin’s legacy on 
view, in the distance, so it was ruled against her that the 
bottles should have their place. And one fine morning 
down came the family after a fearful row of the domestics; 
shouting, screaming, cries for the police, and murder top¬ 
ping all. What did they see ? They saw two prodigious 
burglars extended along the floor, each with one of the 
twin bottles in his hand, and a remainder of the horror of 
the midnight hanging about his person like a blown fog, 
sufficient to frighten them whilst they kicked the rascals 


376 


THE EGOIST 


entirely intoxicated. Never was wilder disorder of wedding, 
presents, and not one lost! — owing, you’ll own, to Uncle 
Benjy’s two bottles of ancient Jamaica rum.” 

Colonel De Craye concluded with an asseveration of the 
truth of the story. 

“A most provident far-sighted old sea-captain!” ex¬ 
claimed Mrs. Mountstuart, laughing at Lady Busshe and 
Lady Culmer. 

These ladies chimed in with her gingerly. 

“And have you many more clever stories, Colonel De 
Craye ? ” said Lady Busshe. 

“ Ah ! my lady, when the tree begins to count its gold 
’tis nigh upon bankruptcy.” 

“ Poetic! ” ejaculated Lady Culmer, spying at Miss Mid¬ 
dleton’s rippled countenance, and noting that she and Sir 
Willoughby had not interchanged word or look. 

“ But that in the case of your Patterne Port a bottle of 
it would outvalue the catalogue of nuptial presents, Wil¬ 
loughby, I would recommend your stationing some such 
constabulary to keep watch and ward,” said Dr. Middleton 
as he filled his glass, taking Bordeaux in the middle of the 
day, under a consciousness of virtue and its reward to 
come at half-past seven in the evening. 

“The dogs would require a dozen of that, sir,” said De 
Craye. 

“ Then it is not to be thought of. Indeed, one! ” Dr. 
Middleton negatived the idea. 

“ We are no further advanced than when we began,” 
observed Lady Busshe. 

“If we are marked to go by stages,” Mrs. Mountstuart 
assented. 

“Why, then, we shall be called old coaches,” remarked 
the colonel. 

“You,” said Lady Culmer, “have the advantage of us in 
a closer acquaintance with Miss Middleton. You know her 
tastes, and how far they have been consulted in the little 
souvenirs already grouped somewhere, although not yet for 
inspection. I am at sea. And here is Lady Busshe in 
deadly alarm. There is plenty of time to effect a change — 
though we are drawing on rapidly to the fatal day, Miss 
Middleton. We are, we are very near it. Oh! yes. I am 


CONVERSATION AT A LUNCHEON-TABLE 377 


one who thinks that these little affairs should be spoken of 
openly, without that ridiculous bourgeois affectation, so that 
we may be sure of giving satisfaction. It is a transaction, 
like everything else in life. I for my part wish to be re 
membered favourably. I put it as a test of breeding to 
speak of these things as plain matter-of-fact. You marry, 
I wish you to have something by you to remind you of me 
What shall it be ? — useful or ornamental. For an ordinary 
household the choice is not difficult. But where wealth 
abounds we are in a dilemma.” 

“ And with persons of decided tastes,” added Lady Busshe 
“ I am really very unhappy,” she protested to Clara. 

Sir Willoughby dropped Lsetitia; Clara’s look of a sedate 
resolution to preserve silence on the topic of the nuptial 
gifts, made a diversion imperative. 

“ Your porcelain was exquisitely chosen, and I profess to 
be a connoisseur,” he said. “ I am poor in old Saxony, as 
you know: I can match the county in Sevres, and my in¬ 
heritance of China will not easily be matched in the 
country.” 

“You may consider your Dragon vases a present from 
young Crossjay,” said De Craye. 

“How ? ” 

“ Has n’t he abstained from breaking them ? the capital 
boy! Porcelain and a boy in the house together is a case of 
prospective disaster fully equal to Flitch and a fly.” 

“ You should understand that my friend Horace — whose 
wit is in this instance founded on another tale of a boy — 
brought us a magnificent piece of porcelain, destroyed by 
the capsizing of his conveyance from the station,” said Sir 
Willoughby to Lady Busshe. 

She and Lady Culmer gave out lamentable Ohs, while 
Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel Patterne sketched the incident. 
Then the lady visitors fixed their eyes in united sympathy 
upon Clara: recovering from which, after a contemplation 
of marble, Lady Busshe emphasized: “No, you do not love 
porcelain, it is evident, Miss Middleton.” 

“ I am glad to be assured of it,” said Lady Culmer. 

“ Oh! I know that face: I know that look,” Lady Busshe 
affected to remark rallyingly: “ it is not the first time I 
have seen it.” 


378 


THE EGOIST 


Sir Willoughby smarted to his marrow. •» We will rout 
these fancies of an over-scrupulous generosity, my dear Lady 
Busshe.” 

Her unwonted breach of delicacy in speaking publicly of 
her present, and the vulgar persistency of her sticking to 
the theme, very much perplexed him. And if he mistook 
her not, she had just alluded to the demoniacal Constantia 
Durham. It might be that he had mistaken her: he was 
on guard against his terrible sensitiveness. Nevertheless 
it was hard to account for this behaviour of a lady greatly 
his friend and admirer, a lady of birth. And Lady Culmer 
as well! — likewise a lady of birth. Were they in collusion ? 
had they a suspicion ? He turned to Lsetitia’s face for the 
antidote to his pain. 

“Oh, but you are not one yet, and I shall require two 
voices to convince me,” Lady Busshe rejoined after another 
stare at the marble. 

“ Lady Busshe, I beg you not to think me ungrateful,” 
said Clara. 

“ Fiddle! — gratitude! it is to please your taste, to satisfy 
you . I care for gratitude as little as for flattery.” 

“But gratitude is flattering,” said Vernon. 

“ Now, no metaphysics, Mr. Whitford.” 

“ But do care a bit for flattery, my lady,” said De Craye. 
“’T is the finest of the Arts; we might call it moral sculpture. 
Adepts in it can cut their friends to any shape they like by 
practising it with the requisite skill. I myself, poor hand 
as I am, have made a man act Solomon by constantly 
praising his wisdom. He took a sagacious turn at an early 
period of the dose. He weighed the smallest question of 
his daily occasions with a deliberation truly oriental. Had 
I pushed it, he’d have hired a baby and a couple of mothers 
to squabble over the undivided morsel.” 

“ I shall hope for a day in London with you,” said Lady 
Culmer to Clara. 

“You did not forget the Queen of Sheba?” said Mrs. 
Mountstuart to De Craye. 

“With her appearance, the game has to be resigned to 
her entirely,” he rejoined. 

“ That is,” Lady Culmer continued, “ if you do not despise 
an old woman for your comrade on a shopping excursion.” 


CONVERSATION AT A LUNCHEON-TABLE 379 


“ Despise whom we fleece! ” exclaimed Dr. Middleton. 
“ Oh, no, Lady Culmer, the sheep is sacred.” 

“ I am not so sure,” said Vernon. 

“ In what way, and to what extent, are you not so sure ? ” 
said Dr. Middleton. 

“ The natural tendency is to scorn the fleeced.” 

“ I stand for the contrary. Pity, if you like: particularly 
when they bleat.” 

“This is to assume that makers of gifts are a fleeced 
people: I demur,” said Mrs. Mountstuart. 

“ Madam, we are expected to give; we are incited to give ; 
you have dubbed it the fashion to give; and the person re¬ 
fusing to give, or incapable of giving, may anticipate that 
he will be regarded as benignly as a sheep of a drooping 
and flaccid wool by the farmer, who is reminded by the poor 
beast’s appearance of a strange dog that worried the flock. 
Even Captain Benjamin, as you have seen, was unable to 
withstand the demand on him. The hymenaeal pair are 
licensed freebooters levying black mail on us; survivors of 
an uncivilized period. But in taking without mercy, I ven¬ 
ture to trust that the maimers of a happier sera instruct 
them not to scorn us. I apprehend that Mr. Whitford has 
a lower order of latrons in his mind.” 

“Permit me to say, sir, that you have not considered the 
ignoble aspect of the fleeced,” said Vernon. “ I appeal to 
the ladies: would they not, if they beheld an ostrich walk¬ 
ing down a Queen’s Drawing Room, clean-plucked, despise 
him though they were wearing his plumes ? ” 

“An extreme supposition indeed,” said Dr. Middleton, 
frowning over it: “scarcely legitimately to be suggested.” 

“I think it fair, sir, as an instance.” 

“Has the circumstance occurred, I would ask?” 

“ In life ? a thousand times.” 

“I fear so,” said Mrs. Mountstuart. 

Lady Busshe showed symptoms of a desire to leave a 
profitless table. 

Vernon started up, glancing at the window. 

“ Did you see Cross jay ? ” he said to Clara. 

“ No; I must, if he is there,” said she. 

She made her way out, Vernon after her. They both 
had the excuse. 


380 


THE EGOIST 


“ Which way did the poor boy go ? ” she asked him. 

“ I have not the slightest idea/’ he replied. “ But put on 
your bonnet, if you would escape that pair of inquisitors.” 

“ Mr. Whitford, what humiliation! ” 

“ I suspect you do not feel it the most, and the end of it 
can’t be remote,” said he. 

Thus it happened that when Lady Busshe and Lady Cul- 
mer quitted the dining-room, Miss Middleton had spirited 
herself away from summoning voice and messenger. 

Sir Willoughby apologized for her absence. “If I could 
be jealous, it would be of that boy Crossjay.” 

“Ycu are an excellent man, and the best of cousins,” 
was Lady Busshe’s enigmatical answer. 

The exceedingly lively conversation at his table was 
lauded by Lady Culmer. 

“Though,” said she, “what it all meant, and what was 
the drift of it, I could n’t tell to save my life. Is it every 
day the same with you here ? ” 

“Very much.” 

“ How you must enjoy a spell of dulness ! ” 

“ If you said, simplicity and not talking for effect! I 
generally cast anchor by Lsetitia Dale.” 

“Ah!” Lady Busshe coughed. “But the fact is, Mrs. 
Mountstuart is mad for cleverness.” 

“ I think, my lady, Laetitia Dale is to the full as clever 
as any of the stars Mrs. Mountstuart assembles, or I.” 

“ Talkative cleverness, I mean.” 

“In conversation as well. Perhaps you have not yet 
given her a chance.” 

“Yes, yes, she is clever, of course, poor dear. She is 
looking better too.” 

“ Handsome, I thought,” said Lady Culmer. 

“ She varies,” observed Sir Willoughby. 

The ladies took seat in their carriage and fell at once 
into a close-bonnet colloquy. Hot a single allusion had 
they made to the wedding-presents after leaving the lun¬ 
cheon-table. The cause of their visit was obvious. 


CLEVER FENCING AND THE NEED FOR IT 381 


CHAPTER XXXVII 

CONTAINS CLEVER FENCING AND INTIMATIONS OF THE NEED 
FOR IT 

That woman, Lady Busshe, had predicted, after the event, 
Constantia Durham’s defection. She had also, subsequent 
to Willoughby’s departure on his travels, uttered sceptical 
things concerning his rooted attachment to Laetitia Dale. In 
her bitter vulgarity, that beaten rival of Mrs. Mountstuart 
Jenkinson for the leadership of the county had taken his nose 
for a melancholy prognostic of his fortunes; she had recently 
played on his name: she had spoken the hideous English of 
his fate. Little as she knew, she was alive to the worst in¬ 
terpretation of appearances. No other eulogy occurred to 
her now than to call him the best of cousins, because Vernon 
Whitford was housed and clothed and fed by him. She had 
nothing else to say for a man she thought luckless! She was 
a woman barren of wit, stripped of style, but she was wealthy 
and a gossip — a forge of showering sparks — and she carried 
Lady Culmer with her. The two had driven from his house 
to spread the malignant rumour abroad: already they blew 
the biting world on his raw wound. Neither of them was 
like Mrs. Mountstuart, a witty woman, who could be hood¬ 
winked ; they were dull women, who steadily kept on their 
own scent of the fact, and the only way to confound such 
inveterate forces was, to be ahead of them, and seize and* 
transform the expected fact, and astonish them, when they 
came up to him, with a totally unanticipated fact. 

“ You see, you were in error, ladies.” 

“ And so we were, Sir Willoughby, and we acknowledge 
it. We never could have guessed that! ” 

Thus the phantom couple in the future delivered them¬ 
selves, as well they might at the revelation. He could run 
far ahead. 

Ay, but to combat these dolts, facts had to be encountered, 
deeds done in groaning earnest. These representatives of 
the nisr-sconces of the population judged by circumstances; 


382 


THE EGOIST 


airy shows and seems had no effect on them. Dexterity of 
fence was thrown away. 

A flying peep at the remorseless might of dulness in com¬ 
pelling us to a concrete performance counter to our inclina¬ 
tions, if we would deceive its terrible instinct, gave Wil¬ 
loughby for a moment the survey of a sage. His intensity 
of personal feeling struck so vivid an illumination of man¬ 
kind at intervals that he would have been individually wise, 
had he not been moved by the source of his accurate percep¬ 
tions to a personal feeling of opposition to his own sagacity. 
He loathed and he despised the vision, so his mind had no 
benefit of it, though he himself was whipped along. He 
chose rather (and the choice is open to us all) to be flattered 
by the distinction it revealed between himself and mankind. 

But if he was not as others were, why was he discomfited, 
solicitous, miserable ? To think that it should be so, ran 
dead against his conqueror’s theories wherein he had been 
trained, which, so long as he gained success awarded success 
to native merit, grandeur to the grand in soul, as light kindles 
light: nature presents the example. His early training, his 
bright beginning of life, had taught him to look to earth’s 
principal fruits as his natural portion, and it was owing to 
a girl that he stood a mark for tongues, naked, wincing at 
the possible malignity of a pair of harridans. Why not 
whistle the girl away ? 

Why, then he would be free to enjoy, careless, younger 
than his youth in the rebound to happiness! 

And then would his nostrils begin to lift and sniff at the 
creeping up of a thick pestiferous vapour. Then in that 
volume of stench would he discern the sullen yellow eye of 
malice. A malarious earth would hunt him all over it. The 
breath of the world, the world’s view of him, was partly his 
vital breath, his view of himself. The ancestry of the tor¬ 
tured man had bequeathed him this condition of high civili¬ 
zation among their other bequests. Your withered contracted 
Egoists of the hut and the grot reck not of public opinion; 
they crave but for liberty and leisure to scratch themselves 
and soothe an excessive scratch. Willoughby was expansive, 
a blooming one, born to look down upon a tributary world, 
and to exult in being looked to. Do we wonder at his con¬ 
sternation in the prospect of that world’s blowing foul on 


CLEVER FENCING AND THE NEED FOR IT 883 


him ? Princes have their obligations to teach them they aro 
mortal, and the brilliant heir of a tributary world is equally 
enchained by the homage it brings him ; — more, inasmuch 
as it is immaterial, elusive, not gathered by the tax, and he 
cannot capitally punish the treasonable recusants. Still 
must he be brilliant; he must court his people. He must 
ever, both in his reputation and his person, aching though 
he be, show them a face and a leg. 

The wounded gentleman shut himself up in his laboratory, 
where he could stride to and fro, and stretch out his arms 
for physical relief, secure from observation of his fantastical 
shapes, under the idea that he was meditating. There was 
perhaps enough to make him fancy it in the heavy fire of 
shots exchanged between his nerves and the situation ; there 
were notable flashes. He would not avow that he was in an 
agony : it was merely a desire for exercise. 

Quintessence of worldliness, Mrs. Mountstuart appeared 
through his farthest window, swinging her skirts on a turn 
at the end of the lawn, with Horace De Craye smirking 
beside her. And the woman’s vaunted penetration was un¬ 
able to detect the histrionic Irishism of the fellow. Or she 
liked him for his acting and nonsense ; nor she only. The 
soluble beast was created to snare women. Willoughby 
became smitten with an adoration of steadfastness in women. 
The incarnation of that divine quality crossed his eyes. She 
was clad in beauty. 

A horrible nondescript convulsion composed of yawn and 
groan drove him to his instruments, to avert a renewal of 
the shock ; and while arranging and fixing them for their 
unwonted task, he compared himself advantageously with 
men like Vernon and De Craye, and others of the county, 
his fellows in the hunting-field and on the Magistrate’s 
bench, who neither understood nor cared for solid work, 
beneficial practical work, the work of Science. 

He was obliged to relinquish it: his hand shook. 

“ Experiments will not advance much at this rate,” he 
said, casting the noxious retardation on his enemies. 

It was not to be contested that he must speak with Mrs. 
Mountstuart, however he might shrink from the trial of his 
facial muscles. Her not coming to him seemed ominous : 
nor was her behaviour at the luncheon-table quite obscure. 


384 


THE EGOIST 


She had evidently instigated the gentlemen to cross and 
counter-chatter Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer. For what 
purpose ? 

Clara’s features gave the answer. 

They were implacable. And he could be the same. 

In the solitude of his room he cried right out: “ I swear 
it, I will never yield her to Horace De Craye! She shall 
feel some of my torments, and try to get the better of them 
by knowing she deserves them.” He had spoken it, and it 
was an oath upon the record. 

Desire to do her intolerable hurt became an ecstasy in his 
veins, and produced another stretching fit, that terminated 
in a violent shake of the body and limbs ; during which he 
was a spectacle for Mrs. Mountstuart at one of the windows. 
He laughed as he went to her, saying: “ No, no work to¬ 
day ; it won’t be done, positively refuses.” 

“I am taking the Professor away,” said she; “he is 
fidgetty about the cold he caught.” 

Sir Willoughby stepped out to her. “1 was trying at a 
bit of work for an hour, not to be idle all day.” 

“ You work in that den of yours every day ? ” 

“ Never less than an hour, if I can snatch it.” 

“ It is a wonderful resource ! ” 

The remark set him throbbing and thinking that a pro¬ 
longation of his crisis exposed him to the approaches of 
some organic malady, possibly heart-disease. 

“A habit,” he said. “ In there I throw off the world.” 

“ We shall see some results in due time.” 

“ I promise none : I like to be abreast of the real knowl¬ 
edge of my day, that is all.” 

“ And a pearl among country gentlemen! ” 

“ In your gracious consideration, my dear lady. Gener¬ 
ally speaking, it would be more adviseable to become a 
chatterer and keep an anecdotal note-book. I could not do 
it, simply because I could not live with my own emptiness 
for the sake of making an occasional display of fireworks. 
I aim at solidity. It is a narrow aim, no doubt; not much 
appreciated.” 

“ Lsetitia Dale appreciates it.” 

A smile of enforced ruefulness, like a leaf curling in heat, 
wrinkled his mouth. 


CLEVEK FENCING AND THE NEED FOE IT 385 

Why did she not speak of her conversation with Clara ? 

“ Have they caught Crossjay ? ” he said. 

“ Apparently they are giving chase to him.” 

The likelihood was, that Clara had been overcome by 
timidity. 

“Must you leave us ?” 

“ I think it prudent to take Professor Crooklyn away.” 

“He still . . .?” 

“The extraordinary resemblance ! ” 

“ A word aside to Dr. Middleton will dispel that.” 

“ You are thoroughly good.” 

This hateful encomium of commiseration transfixed him. 
Then, she knew of his calamity! 

“ Philosophical,” he said, “ would be the proper term, I 
think.” 

“ Colonel De Craye, by the way, promises me a visit when 
he leaves you.” 

“ To-morrow ? ” 

“The earlier the better. He is too captivating; he is 
delightful. He won me in five minutes. I don’t accuse 
him. Nature gifted him to cast the spell. We are weak 
women, Sir Willoughby.” 

She knew! 

“ Like to like : the witty to the witty, ma’am.” 

“ You won’t compliment me with a little bit of jealousy ? * 

“I forbear from complimenting him .” 

“ Be philosophical, of course, if you have the philosophy.” 

“ I pretend to it. Probably I suppose myself to succeed 
because I have no great requirement of it; I cannot say. 
We are riddles to ourselves.” 

Mrs. Mountstuart pricked the turf with the point of her 
parasol. She looked down and she looked up. 

“ Well ? ” said he to her eyes. 

“Well, and where is Laetitia Dale?” 

He turned about to show his face elsewhere. 

When he fronted her again she looked very fixedly, and 
set her head shaking. 

“ It will not do, my dear Sir Willoughby I ” 

« What?” 

“It.” 

“I never oould solve enigmas.” 


886 


THE EGOIST 


“ Playing ta-ta-ta-ta ad infinitum, then. Things have 
gone far. All parties would be happier for an excursion. 
Send her home.” 

“ Laetitia ? I can’t part with her.” 

Mrs. Mountstuart put a tooth on her under lip as her head 
renewed its brushing negative. 

“ In what way can it be hurtful that she should be here, 
ma’am ? ” he ventured to persist. 

“ Think.” 

“ She is proof.” 

“ Twice! ” 

The word was big artillery. He tried the affectation of 
a staring stupidity. She might have seen his heart thump, 
and he quitted the mask for an agreeable grimace. 

“ She is inaccessible. She is my friend. I guarantee 
her, on my honour. Have no fear for her. I beg you to 
have confidence in me. I would perish rather. No soul on 
earth is to be compared with her.” 

Mrs. Mountstuart repeated, “ Twice ! ” 

The low monosyllable, musically spoken in the same 
tone of warning of a gentle ghost, rolled a thunder that 
maddened him, but he dared not take it up to fight against 
it on plain terms. 

“ Is it for my sake ? ” he said. 

“ It will not do, Sir Willoughby ! ” 

She spurred him to a frenzy. 

“My dear Mrs. Mountstuart, you have been listening to 
tales. I am not a tyrant. I am one of the most easy-going 
of men. Let us preserve the forms due to society: I say no 
more. As for poor old Vernon, people call me a good sort 
of cousin; I should like to see him comfortably married; 
decently married this time. I have proposed to contribute 
to his establishment. I mention it to show that the case 
has been practically considered. He has had a tolerably 
souring experience of the state; he might be inclined if, 
say, you took him in hand for another venture. It’s a 
demoralizing lottery. However, Government sanctions it.” 

“But, Sir Willoughby, what is the use of my taking 
him in hand, when, as you tell me, Laetitia Dale holds 
back?” 

“ She certainly does.” 


CLEVER FENCING AND THE NEED FOR IT 387 


“Then we are talking to no purpose, unless you under¬ 
take to melt her.” 

He suffered a lurking smile to kindle to some strength of 
meaning. 

“ You are not over-considerate in committing me to such 
an office.” 

“ You are afraid of the danger ? ” she all but sneered. 

Sharpened by her tone, he said, “ I have such a love of 
steadfastness of character, that I should be a poor advocate 
in the endeavour to break it. And frankly, I know the 
danger. I saved my honour when I made the attempt: 
that is all I can say.” 

“ Upon my word,” Mrs. Mountstuart threw back her head 
to let her eyes behold him summarily over their fine aqui¬ 
line bridge, “you have the heart of mystification, my good 
friend.” 

“ Abandon the idea of Laetitia Dale.” 

“And marry your cousin Vernon to whom ? Where are 
we ?” 

“ As I said, ma’am, I am an easy-going man. I really 
have not a spice of the tyrant in me. An intemperate 
creature held by the collar may have that notion of me, 
while pulling to be released as promptly as it entered the 
noose. But I do strictly and sternly object to the scandal of 
violent separations, open breaches of solemn engagements, a 
public rupture. Put it that I am the cause, I will not con¬ 
sent to a violation of decorum. Is that clear ? It is just 
possible for things to be arranged so that all parties may 
be happy in their way without much hubbub. Mind, it is 
not I who have willed it so. I am, and I am forced to be, 
passive. But I will not be obstructive.” 

He paused, waving his hand to signify the vanity of the 
more that might be said. 

Some conception of him, dashed by incredulity, excited 
the lady’s intelligence. 

“ Well! ” she exclaimed, “ you have planted me in the 
land of conjecture. As my husband used to say, I don’t 
see light, but I think I see the lynx that does. We won’t 
discuss it at present. I certainly must be a younger woman 
than I supposed, for I am learning hard. — Here comes the 
Professor, buttoned up to the ears, aud Dr. Middleton flap- 


888 


THE EGOIST 


ping in the breeze. There will be a cough and a footnote 
referring to the young lady at the station, if we stand 
together, so please order my carriage.” 

“ You found Clara complacent ? roguish ? ” 

“ I will call to-morrow. You have simplified my task, 
Sir Willoughby, very much ; that is, assuming that I have 
not entirely mistaken you. I am so far in the dark, that 
I have to help myself by recollecting how Lady Busshe op¬ 
posed my view of a certain matter formerly. Scepticism is 
her forte. It will be the very oddest thing if after all . . . ! 
No, I shall own, romance has not departed. Are you fond of 
dupes ? ” 

“ I detest the race.” 

“ An excellent answer. I could pardon you for it.” She 
refrained from adding : “ If you are making one of me.” 

Sir Willoughby went to ring for her carriage. 

She knew. That was palpable: Clara had betrayed him. 
“ The earlier Colonel De Craye leaves Patterne Hall the 
better:” she had said that: and, “all parties would be 
happier for an excursion.” She knew the position of things 
and she guessed the remainder. But what she did not 
know, and could not divine, was the man who fenced her. 
He speculated further on the witty and the dull. These 
latter are the redoubtable body. They will have facts to 
convince them; they had, he confessed it to himself, pre¬ 
cipitated him into the novel sphere of his dark hints to 
Mrs. Mountstuart; from which the utter darkness might 
allow him to escape, yet it embraced him singularly, and 
even pleasantly, with the sense of a fact established. 

It embraced him even very pleasantly. There was an end 
to his tortures. He sailed on a tranquil sea, the husband 
of a steadfast woman — no rogue. The exceeding beauty 
of steadfastness in women clothed Lsetitia in graces Clara 
could not match. A tried, steadfast woman is the one 
jewel of the sex. She points to her husband like the sun¬ 
flower ; her love illuminates him; she lives in him, for 
him ; she testifies to his worth; she drags the world to 
his feet; she leads the chorus of his praises; she justifies 
him in his own esteem. Surely there is not on earth such 
beauty! 

If we have to pass through anguish to discover it and 


CLEVER FENCING AND THE NEED FOR IT 389 


cherish the peace it gives, to clasp it, calling it ours, is a 
full reward. 

Deep in his reverie, he said his adieux to Mrs. Mount- 
stuart, and strolled up the avenue behind the carriage- 
wheels, unwilling to meet Laetitia till he had exhausted the 
fresh savour of the cud of fancy. 

Supposing it done ! — 

It would be generous on his part. It would redound to 
his credit. 

His home would be a fortress, impregnable to tongues. 
He would have divine security in his home. 

One who read and knew and worshipped him would be 
sitting there starlike: sitting there, awaiting him, his fixed 
star. 

It would be marriage with a mirror, with an echo; mar¬ 
riage with a shining mirror, a choric echo. 

It would be marriage with an intellect, with a fine under¬ 
standing; to make his home a fountain of repeatable wit: 
to make his dear old Patterne Hall the luminary of the 
county. 

He revolved it as a chant: with anon and anon involun¬ 
tarily a discordant animadversion on Lady Busshe. His 
attendant imps heard the angry inward cry. 

Forthwith he set about painting Laetitia in delectable 
human colours, like a miniature of the past century, reserv¬ 
ing her ideal figure for his private satisfaction. The world 
was to bow to her visible beauty, and he gave her enamel 
and glow, a taller stature, a swimming air, a transcendancy 
that exorcised the image of the old witch who had driven 
him to this. 

The result in him was, that Laetitia became humanly and 
avowedly beautiful. Her dark eyelashes on the pallor of 
her cheeks lent their aid to the transformation, which was a 
necessity to him, so it was performed. He received the 
waxen impression. 

His retinue of imps had a revel. We hear wonders of 
men, and we see a lifting up of hands in the world. The 
wonders would be explained, and never a hand need to 
interject, if the mystifying man were but accompanied and 
reported of by that monkey-eyed confraternity. They spy 
the heart and its twists. 


390 


THE EGOIST 


The heart is the magical gentleman. None of them would 
follow where there was no heart. The twists of the heart 
are the comedy. 

“ The secret of the heart is its pressing love of selff says 
the Book. 

By that secret the mystery of the organ is legible : and a 
comparison of the heart to the mountain rillet is taken up 
to show us the unbaffled force of the little channel in seeking 
to swell its volume, strenuously, sinuously, ever in pursuit of 
self; the busiest as it is the most single-aiming of forces on 
our earth. And we are directed to the sinuosities for the 
posts of observation chiefly instructive. 

Few maintain a stand there. People see, and they rush 
away to interchange liftings of hands at the sight, instead of 
patiently studying the phenomenon of energy. 

Consequently a man in love with one woman, and in all 
but absolute consciousness, behind the thinnest of veils, pre¬ 
paring his mind to love another, will be barely credible. 
The particular hunger of the forceful but adaptable heart is 
the key of him. Behold the mountain rillet, become a 
brook, become a torrent, how it inarms a handsome boulder: 
yet if the stone will not go with it, on it hurries, pursuing 
self in extension, down to where perchance a dam has been 
raised of a sufficient depth to enfold and keep it from inordi¬ 
nate restlessness. Laetitia represented this peaceful restrain¬ 
ing space in prospect. 

But she was a faded young woman. He was aware of it; 
and systematically looking at himself with her upturned 
orbs, he accepted her benevolently, as a God grateful for 
worship, and used the divinity she imparted to paint and 
renovate her. His heart required her so. The heart works 
the springs of imagination; imagination received its com¬ 
mission from the heart, and was a cunning artist. 

Cunning to such a degree of seductive genius that the 
masterpiece it offered to his contemplation enabled him 
simultaneously to gaze on Clara and think of Laetitia. Clara 
came through the park-gates with Vernon, a brilliant girl 
indeed, and a shallow one: a healthy creature, and an 
animal ; attractive, but capricious, impatient, treacherous, 
foul; a woman to drag men through the mud. She ap. 
proached. 


TO THE CENTRE OF EGOISM 


391 


CHAPTER XXXYHI 

IN WHICH WE TAKE A STEP TO THE CENTRE OF EGOISM 

They met; Vernon soon left them. 

“ You have not seen Cross jay ? ” Willoughby inquired. 

“ No,” said Clara. “ Once more I beg you to pardon him. 
He spoke falsely, owing to his poor boy’s idea of chivalry.” 

“ The chivalry to the sex which commences in lies, ends 
by creating the woman’s hero, whom we see about the world 
and in certain Courts of Law.” 

His ability to silence her was great: she could not reply 
to speech like that. 

“You have,” said he, “ made a confidante of Mrs. Mount- 
stuart.” 

“Yes” 

“ This is your purse.” 

“ I thank you.” 

“ Professor Crooklyn has managed to make your father 
acquainted with your project. That, I suppose, is the rail¬ 
way ticket in the fold of the purse. He was assured at the 
station that you had taken a ticket to London, and would 
not want the fly.” 

“ It is true. I was foolish.” 

“ You have had a pleasant walk with Vernon — turning 
me in and out ? ” 

“ We did not speak of you. You allude to what he would 
never consent to.” 

“ He’s an honest fellow, in his old-fashioned way. He’s 
a secret old fellow,, Does he ever talk about his wife to 
you ? ” 

Clara dropped her purse, and stooped and picked it up. 

“ I know nothing of Mr. Whitford’s affairs,” she said, 
and she opened the purse and tore to pieces the railway- 
ticket. 

“ The story*s a proof that romantic spirits do not furnish 
the most romantic history. You have the word ‘ chivalry ’ 
frequently on your lips. He chivalrously married the 
daughter of the lodging-house where he resided before I 


392 


THE EGOIST 


took him. We obtained information of the auspicious 
union in a newspaper report of Mrs. Whitford’s drunken¬ 
ness and rioting at a London railway terminus — probably 
the one whither your ticket would have taken you yester¬ 
day, for I heard the lady was on her way to us for supplies, 
the connubial larder being empty.” 

“ I am sorry; I am ignorant; I have heard nothing ; I 
know nothing,” said Clara. 

“ You are disgusted. But half the students and authors 
you hear of marry in that way. And very few have Ver¬ 
non’s luck.” 

“ She had good qualities ? ” 

Her under lip hung. 

It looked like disgust; he begged her not indulge the 
feeling. 

“ Literary men, it is notorious, even with the entry to 
society, have no taste in women. The housewife is their 
object. Ladies frighten and would, no doubt, be an annoy¬ 
ance and hindrance to them at home.” 

“ You said he was fortunate.” 

“You have a kindness for him.” 

“ I respect him.” 

“ He is a friendly old fellow in his awkward fashion; 
honourable, and so forth. But a disreputable alliance of 
that sort sticks to a man. The world will talk. Yes, he 
was fortunate so far; he fell into the mire and got out of 
it. Were he to marry again . . .” 

“She ... ? ” 

“Died. Do not be startled; it was a natural death. She 
responded to the sole wishes left to his family. He buried 
the woman, and I received him. I took him on my tour. 
A second marriage might cover the first: there would be a 
buzz about the old business : the woman’s relatives write to 
him still, try to bleed him, I dare say. However, now you 
understand his gloominess. I don’t imagine he regrets his 
loss. He probably sentimentalizes, like most men when 
they are well rid of a burden. You must not think the 
worse of him.” 

“ I do not,” said Clara. 

“ I defend him whenever the matter’s discussed.” 

“ I hope you do.” 


TO THE CENTRE OF EGOISM 


393 


“ Without approving his folly. I can’t wash him clean.” 

They were at the Hall-doors. She waited for any per¬ 
sonal communications he might be pleased to make, and as 
there was none, she ran upstairs to her room. 

He had tossed her to Vernon in his mind not only pain¬ 
lessly, but with a keen acid of satisfaction. The heart is 
the wizard. 

Next he bent his deliberate steps to Laetitia. 

The mind was guilty of some hesitation; the feet went 
forward. 

She was working at an embroidery by an open window. 
Colonel De Craye leaned outside, and Willoughby pardoned 
her air of demure amusement, on hearing him say : “No, I 
have had one of the pleasantest half-hours of my life, and 
would rather idle here, if idle you will have it, than employ 
my faculties on horse-back.” 

“ Time is not lost in conversing with Miss Dale,” said 
Willoughby. 

The light was tender to her complexion where she sat in 
partial shadow. 

De Craye asked whether Crossjay had been caught. 
Laetitia murmured a kind word for the boy. Willoughby 
examined her embroidery. 

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel appeared. 

They invited her to take carriage-exercise with them. 

Laetitia did not immediately answer, and Willoughby 
remarked : “ Miss Dale has been reproving Horace for idle¬ 
ness, and I recommend you to enlist him to do duty, while 
I relieve him here.” 

The ladies had but to look at the colonel. He was at 
their disposal, if they would have him. He was marched to 
the carriage. 

Laetitia plied her threads. 

“Colonel De Craye spoke of Crossjay,” she said. “May 
I hope you have forgiven the poor boy, Sir Willoughby? ” 

He replied: “ Plead for him.” 

“ I wish I had eloquence.” 

“ In my opinion you have it.” 

“If he offends, it is never from meanness. At school, 
among comrades, he would shine. He is in too strong a 
light j his feelings and his moral nature are over-excited ” 


394 


THE EGOIST 


“That was not the case when he was at home with 
you.” 

“ I am severe; I am stern.” 

“ A Spartan mother! ” 

“My system of managing a boy would be after that 
model: except in this: he should always feel that he could 
obtain forgiveness.” 

“ Not at the expense of justice ? ” 

“ Ah! young creatures are not to be arraigned before the 
higher Courts. It seems to me perilous to terrify their 
imaginations. If we do so, are we not likely to produce the 
very evil we are combating ? The alternations for the 
young should be school and home: and it should be in their 
hearts to have confidence that forgiveness alternates with 
discipline. They are of too tender an age for the rigours 
of the world; we are in danger of hardening them. I 
prove to you that I am not possessed of eloquence. You 
encouraged me to speak, Sir Willoughby.” 

“ You speak wisely, Lsetitia.” 

“ I think it true. Will not you reflect on it ? You have 
only to do so, to forgive him. I am growing bold indeed, 
and shall have to beg forgiveness for myself.” 

“ You still write ? you continue to work with your pen? ” 
said Willoughby. 

“A little; a very little.” 

“ I do not like you to squander yourself, waste yourself, 
on the public. You are too precious to feed the beast. Giv¬ 
ing out incessantly must end by attenuating. Reserve 
yourself for your friends. Why should they be robbed of 
so much of you ? Is it not reasonable to assume that by 
lying fallow you would be more enriched for domestic life ? 
Candidly, had I authority I would confiscate your pen: I 
would ‘away with that bauble.’ You will not often find me 
quoting Cromwell, but his words apply in this instance. I 
would say rather, that lancet. Perhaps it is the more cor¬ 
rect term. It bleeds you, it wastes you. For what ? For 
a breath of fame ! ” 

“ I write for money.” 

“And there — I would say of another — you subject 
yourself to the risk of mental degradation. Who knows ? 

moral! Trafficking the brains for money, must bring 


TO THE CENTRE OF EGOISM 395 

them to the level of the purchasers in time. I confiscate 
your pen, Laetitia.” 

“ It will be to confiscate your own gift, Sir Willoughby.” 

“ Then that proves — will you tell me the date ? ” 

“You sent me a gold pen-holder on my sixteenth birth¬ 
day.” 

“It proves my utter thoughtlessness then, and later. 
And later! ” 

He rested an elbow on his knee and covered his eyes, 
murmuring in that profound hollow which is haunted by 
the voice of a contrite past: “ And later ! ” 

The deed could be done. He had come to the conclu¬ 
sion that it could be done, though the effort to harmonize 
the figure sitting near him, with the artistic figure of 
his purest pigments, had cost him labour and a blinking 
of the eyelids. That also could be done. Her pleasant 
tone, sensible talk, and the light favouring her complexion, 
helped him in his effort. She was a sober cup; sober and 
wholesome. Deliriousness is for adolescence. The men 
who seek intoxicating cups are men who invite their 
fates. 

Curiously, yet as positively as things can be affirmed, the 
husband of this woman would be able to boast of her virtues 
and treasures abroad, as he could not — impossible to say 
why not — boast of a beautiful wife or a blue-stocking wife. 
One of her merits as a wife would be this extraordinary 
neutral merit of a character that demanded colour from the 
marital hand, and would take it. 

Laetitia had not to learn that he had much to distress him. 
Her wonder at his exposure of his grief counteracted a flut¬ 
tering of vague alarm. She was nervous; she sat in expec¬ 
tation of some bursts of regrets or of passion. 

“ I may hope that you have pardoned Crossjay ? ” she 
said. 

“ My friend,” said he, uncovering his face, “ I am governed 
by principles. Convince me of an error, I shall not obsti¬ 
nately pursue a premeditated course. But you know me. 
Men who have not principles to rule their conduct are — well, 
they are unworthy of a half-hour of companionship with 
you. I will speak to you to-night. I have letters to de¬ 
spatch. To-night: at twelve: in the room where we spoke 


396 


THE EGOIST 


last. Or await me in the drawing-room. I have to attend 
on my guests till late.” 

He bowed ; he was in a hurry to go. 

The deed could be done. It must be done; it was his 
destiny. 


CHAPTEK XXXIX 

IN THE HEART OF THE EGOIST 

But already he had begun to regard the deed as his execu¬ 
tioner. He dreaded meeting Clara. The folly of having 
retained her stood before him. How now to look on her and 
keep a sane resolution unwavering ? She tempted to the 
insane. Had she been away, he could have walked through 
the performance composed by the sense of doing a duty to 
himself: perhaps faintly hating the poor wretch he made 
happy at last, kind to her in a manner, polite. Clara’s 
presence in the house previous to the deed, and oh, heaven ! 
after it, threatened his wits. Pride ? He had none; he 
cast it down for her to trample it; he caught it back ere it 
was trodden on. Yes ; he had pride : he had it as a dagger 
in his breast: his pride was his misery. But he was too 
proud to submit to misery. “ What I do is right.” He said 
the words, and rectitude smoothed his path, till the question 
clamoured for answer : Would the world countenance and 
endorse his pride in Laetitia ? At one time, yes. And now ? 
Clara’s beauty ascended, laid a beam on him. 

We are on board the labouring vessel of humanity in a 
storm, when cries and countercries ring out, disorderliness 
mixes the crew, and the fury of self-preservation divides: 
this one is for the ship, that one for his life. Clara was the 
former to him, Laetitia the latter. But what if there might 
not be greater safety in holding tenaciously to Clara than in 
casting her off for Laetitia ? No, she had done things to set 
his pride throbbing in the quick. She had gone bleeding 
about first to one, then to another; she had betrayed him to 
Vernon, and to Mrs. Mountstuart; a look in the eyes of 
Horace De Craye said, to him as well; to whom not ? He 



IN THE HEART OF THE EGOIST 


397 


might hold to her for vengeance; but that appetite was 
short-lived in him if it ministered nothing to his purposes. 
“ I discard all idea of vengeance,” he said, and thrilled burn- 
ingly to a smart in his admiration of the man who could 
be so magnanimous under mortal injury: for the more 
admirable he, the more pitiable. He drank a drop or two of 
self-pity like a poison, repelling the assaults of public pity. 
Clara must be given up. It must be seen by the world that, 
as he felt, the thing he did was right. Laocoon of his own 
serpents, he struggled to a certain magnificence of attitude 
in the muscular net of constrictions he flung around himself. 
Clara must be given up. 0 bright Abominable! She must 
be given up: but not to one whose touch of her would be 
darts in the blood of the yielder, snakes in his bed: she must 
be given up to an extinguisher; to be the second wife of an 
old-fashioned semi-recluse, disgraced in his first. And were 
it publicly known that she had been cast off, and had fallen 
on old Vernon for a refuge, and part in spite, partin shame, 
part in desperation, part in a fit of good sense under the cir¬ 
cumstances, espoused him, her beauty would not influence 
the world in its judgement. The world would know what 
to think. As the instinct of self-preservation whispered to 
Willoughby, the world, were it requisite, might be taught to 
think what it assuredly would not think if she should be 
seen tripping to the altar with Horace De Craye. Self-pres¬ 
ervation, not vengeance, breathed that whisper. He glanced 
at her iniquity for a justification of it, without any desire to 
do her a permanent hurt: he was highly civilized : but with 
a strong intention to give her all the benefit of the scandal, 
supposing a scandal, or ordinary tattle. 

“ And so he handed her to his cousin and secretary, Ver¬ 
non Whitford, who opened his mouth and shut his eyes.” 

You hear the world ? How are we to stop it from chatter¬ 
ing ? Enough that he had no desire to harm her. Some 
gentle anticipations of her being tarnished were imperative ; 
they came spontaneously to him ; otherwise the radiance of 
that bright Abominable in loss would have been insufferable ; 
he could not have borne it ; he could never have surrendered 
her. 

Moreover, a happy present effect was the result. He 
conjured up the anticipated chatter and shrug of the world 


398 


THE EGOIST 


so vividly that her beauty grew hectic with the stain, bereft 
of its formidable magnetism. He could meet her calmly ; he 
had steeled himself. Purity in women was his principal 
stipulation, and a woman puffed at, was not the person to 
cause him tremours. 

Consider him indulgently : the Egoist is the Son of Him¬ 
self. He is likewise the Father. And the son loves the 
father, the father the son ; they reciprocate affection through 
the closest of ties ; and shall they view behaviour unkindly 
wounding either of them, not for each other’s dear sake 
abhorring the criminal ? They would not injure you, but 
they cannot consent to see one another suffer or crave in 
vain. The two rub together in sympathy besides relation¬ 
ship to an intenser one. Are you, without much offending, 
sacrificed by them, it is on the altar of their mutual love, to 
filial piety or paternal tenderness : the younger has offered a 
dainty morsel to the elder, or the elder to the younger. 
Absorbed in their great example of devotion, they do not 
think of you. They are beautiful. 

Yet is it most true that the younger has the passions of 
youth : whereof will come division between them ; and this 
is a tragic state. They are then pathetic. This was the 
state of Sir Willoughby lending ear to his elder, until he 
submitted to bite at the fruit proposed to him — with how 
wry a mouth the venerable senior chose not to mark. At 
least, as we perceive, a half of him was ripe of wisdom in his 
own interests. The cruder half had but to be obedient to 
the leadership of sagacity for his interests to be secured, 
and a filial disposition assisted him ; painfully indeed; but the 
same rare quality directed the good gentleman to swallow 
his pain. That the son should bewail his fate were a dis¬ 
honour to the sire. He reverenced, and submitted. Thus, 
to say, consider him indulgently, is too much an appeal for 
charity on behalf of one requiring but initial anatomy — a 
slicing in halves — to exonerate, perchance exalt him. The 
Egoist is our fountain-head, primeval man : the primitive is 
born again, the elemental reconstituted. Born again, into 
new conditions, the primitive may be highly polished of 
men, and forfeit nothing save the roughness of his original 
nature. He is not only his own father, he is ours ; and he 
is also our son. We have produced him, he us. Such were 


IN THE HEART OF THE EGOIST 


399 


we, to such are we returning: not other, sings the poet, than 
one who toilfully works his shallop against the tide, “ si 
brachia forte remisit ” : — let him haply relax the labour of 
his arms, however high up the stream, and back he goes, 
“ in pejus,” to the early principle of our being, with seeds and 
plants, that are as carelessly weighed in the hand and as 
indiscriminately husbanded as our humanity. 

Poets on the other side may be cited for an assurance that 
the primitive is not the degenerate : rather is he a sign of 
the indestructibility of the race, of the ancient energy in re¬ 
moving obstacles to individual growth ; a sample of what we 
would be, had we his concentrated power. He is the origi¬ 
nal innocent, the pure simple. It is we who have fallen; 
we have melted into Society, diluted our essence, dissolved. 
He stands in the midst monumentally, a landmark of the 
tough and honest old Ages, with the symbolic alphabet of 
striking arms and running legs, our early language, scrawled 
over his person, and the glorious first flint and arrow-head 
for his crest: at once the spectre of the Kitchen-midden and 
our ripest issue. 

But Society is about him. The occasional spectacle of the 
primitive dangling on a rope has impressed his mind with 
the strength of his natural enemy : from which uncongenial 
sight he has turned shuddering hardly less to behold the 
blast that is blown upon a reputation where one has been 
disrespectful of the many. By these means, through medi¬ 
tation on the contrast of circumstances in life, a pulse of 
imagination has begun to stir, and he has entered the upper 
sphere, or circle of spiritual Egoism : he has become the 
civilized Egoist; primitive still, as sure as man has teeth, 
but developed in his manner of using them. 

Degenerate or not (and there is no just reason to suppose 
it), Sir Willoughby was a social Egoist, fiercely imaginative 
in whatsoever concerned him. He had discovered a greater 
realm than that of the sensual appetites, and he rushed 
across and around it in his conquering period with an Alex¬ 
ander’s pride. On these wind-like journeys he had carried 
Constantia, subsequently Clara; and however it may have 
been in the case of Miss Durham, in that of Miss Middle- 
ton it is almost certain she caught her glimpse of his 
interior from sheer fatigue in hearing him discourse of 


400 


THE EGOIST 


it. What he revealed was not the cause of her sickness: 
women can bear revelations — they are exciting: but the 
monotonousness. He slew imagination. There is no direr 
disaster in love than the death of imagination. He dragged 
her through the labyrinths of his penetralia, in his hungry 
coveting to be loved more and still more, more still, until 
imagination gave up the ghost, and he talked to her plain 
hearing like a monster. It must have been that; for the 
spell of the primitive upon women is masterful up to the 
time of contact. 

“ And so he handed her to his cousin and secretary Ver¬ 
non Whitford, who opened his mouth and shut his eyes.” 

The urgent question was, how it was to be accomplished. 
Willoughby worked at the subject with all his power of 
concentration: a power that had often led him to feel and 
say, that as a barrister, a diplomatist, or a general, he would 
have won his grades : and granting him a personal interest 
in the business, he might have achieved eminence: he 
schemed and fenced remarkably well. 

He projected a scene, following expressions of anxiety on 
account of old Vernon and his future settlement: and then 
— Clara maintaining her doggedness, to which he was now 
so accustomed that he could not conceive a change in it — 
says he: “ If you determine on breaking, I give you back 
your word on one condition .” Whereupon she starts: he 
insists on her promise: she declines: affairs resume their 
former footing; she frets, she begs for the disclosure: he 
flatters her by telling her his desire to keep her in the 
family: she is unilluminated, but strongly moved by curb 
osity: he philosophizes on marriage — “ What are we ? poor 
creatures! we must get through life as we can, doing as 
much good as we can to those we love; and think as you 
please, I love old Vernon. Am I not giving you the great¬ 
est possible proof of it ?” She will not see. Then flatly 
out comes the one condition. That and no other. “ Take 
Vernon and I release you.” She refuses. Now ensues the 
debate, all the oratory being with him. “Is it because of 
his unfortunate first marriage ? You assured me you 
thought no worse of him : &c.” She declares the proposal 
revolting. He can distinguish nothing that should offend 
her in a pr^w'ftal to make his cousin happy if she will not 


IN THE HEART OF THE EGOIST 


401 


him. Irony and sarcasm relieve his emotions, but he con¬ 
vinces her he is dealing plainly and intends generosity. She 
is confused; she speaks in maiden fashion. 

He touches again on Vernon’s early escapade. She does 
not enjoy it. The scene closes with his bidding her reflect 
on it, and remember the one condition of her release. Mrs. 
Mountstuart Jenkinson, now reduced to believe that he 
burns to be free, is then called in for an interview with 
Clara. His aunts Eleanor and Isabel besiege her. Laetitia 
in passionate earnest besieges her. Her father is wrought 
on to besiege her. Finally Vernon is attacked by Wil¬ 
loughby and Mrs. Mountstuart: — and here, Willoughby 
chose to think, was the main difficulty. But the girl has 
money ; she is agreeable; Vernon likes her ; she is fond of 
his “ Alps,” they have tastes in common, he likes her father, 
and in the end he besieges her. Will she yield ? De Craye 
is absent. There is no other way of shunning a marriage 
she is incomprehensibly but frantically averse to. She is in 
the toils. Her father will stay at Patterne Hall as long as 
his host desires it. She hesitates, she is overcome; in 
spite of a certain nausea due to Vernon’s preceding alliance, 
she yields. 

Willoughby revolved the entire drama in Clara’s pres¬ 
ence. It helped him to look on her coolly. Conducting 
her to the dinner-table, he spoke of Cross jay, not unkindly; 
and at table he revolved the set of scenes with a heated 
animation that took fire from the wine and the face of his 
friend Horace, while he encouraged Horace to be flowingly 
Irish. He nipped the fellow good-humouredly once or 
twice, having never felt so friendly to him since the day of 
his arrival; but the position of critic is instinctively taken 
by men who do not flow: and Patterne Port kept Dr. Mid* 
dleton in a benevolent reserve when Willoughby decided 
that something said by De Craye was not new, and laugh* 
ingly accused him of failing to consult his anecdotal note¬ 
book for the double-cross to his last sprightly sally. 
“ Your sallies are excellent, Horace, but spare us your Aunt 
Sallies! ” De Craye had no repartee, nor did Dr. Middle- 
ton challenge a pun. We have only to sharpen our wits to 
trip your seductive rattler whenever we may choose to 
think proper; and evidently, if we condescended to it, we 


402 


THE EGOIST 


could do better than he. The critic who has hatched a 
witticism is impelled to this opinion. Judging by the 
smiles of the ladies, they thought so too. 

Shortly before eleven o’clock, Dr. Middleton made a 
Spartan stand against the offer of another bottle of Port. 
The regulation couple of bottles had been consumed in equal 
partnership, and the Rev. Doctor and his host were free to 
pay a ceremonial visit to the drawing-room, where they were 
not expected. A piece of work of the elder ladies, a silken 
boudoir sofa-rug, was being examined, with high approval 
of the two younger. Vernon and Colonel De Craye had 
gone out in search of Cross jay, one to Mr. Dale’s cottage, 
the other to call at the head and under game-keepers. They 
were said to be strolling and smoking, for the night w r as 
fine. Willoughby left the room and came back with the 
key of Cross jay’s door in his pocket. He foresaw that the 
delinquent might be of service to him. 

Laetitia and Clara sang together. Laetitia was flushed, 
Clara pale. At eleven they saluted the ladies Eleanor and 
Isabel. Willoughby said, “Good night” to each of them, 
contrasting as he did so the downcast look of Laetitia with 
Clara’s frigid directness. He divined that they were off to 
talk over their one object of common interest, Cross jay. 
Saluting his aunts, he took up the rug, to celebrate their 
diligence and taste; and that he might make Dr. Middleton 
impatient for bed, he provoked him to admire it, held it out 
and laid it out, and caused the courteous old gentleman some 
confusion in hitting on fresh terms of commendation. 

Before midnight the room was empty. Ten minutes later, 
Willoughby paid it a visit, and found it untenanted by the 
person he had engaged to be there. Vexed by his disap 
pointment, he paced up and down, and chanced abstractedly 
to catch the rug in his hand; for what purpose, he might well 
ask himself; admiration of ladies’ work, in their absence, 
was unlikely to occur to him. Nevertheless the touch of 
the warm soft silk was meltingly feminine. A glance at 
the mantel-piece clock told him Laetitia was twenty minutes 
behind the hour. 

Her remissness might endanger all his plans, alter the 
whole course of his life. The colours in which he painted 
her were too lively to last; the madness in his head threat- 


MIDNIGHT 


403 


ened to subside. Certain it was that he could not be ready 
a second night for the sacrifice he had been about to 
perform. 

The clock was at the half hour-after twelve. He flung the 
silken thing on the central ottoman, extinguished the lamps, 
and walked out of the room, charging the absent Laetitia to 
bear her misfortune with a consciousness of deserving it. 


CHAPTER XL 

MIDNIGHT: SIR WILLOUGHBY AND LA5TITIA : WITH YOUNG 
CROSSJAY UNDER A COVERLET 

Young Cross jay was a glutton at holidays and never 
thought of home till it was dark. The close of the day saw 
him several miles away from the Hall, dubious whether he 
would not round his numerous adventures by sleeping at an 
inn; for he had lots of money, and the idea of jumping up 
in the morning in a strange place was thrilling. Besides, 
when he was shaken out of sleep by Sir Willoughby, he had 
been told that he was to go, and not to show his face at 
Patterne again. On the other hand, Miss Middleton had 
bidden him come back. There was little question with him 
which person he should obey : he followed his heart. 

Supper at an inn, where he found a companj^ to listen to 
his adventures, delayed him, and a short cut, intended to 
make up for it, lost him his road. He reached the Hall 
very late, ready to be in love with the horrible pleasure of a 
night’s rest under the stars, if necessary. But a candle 
burned at one of the back windows. He knocked, and a 
kitchen-maid let him in. She had a bowl of hot soup pre¬ 
pared for him. Crossjay tried a mouthful to please her. 
His head dropped over it. She roused him to his feet, and 
he pitched against her shoulder. The dry air of the kitchen 
department had proved too much for the tired youngster. 
Mary, the maid, got him to step as firmly as he was able, 
and led him by the back-way to the hall, bidding him creep 
noiselessly to bed. He understood his position in the house, 
and though he could have gone fast to sleep on the stairs, 



404 


THE EGOIST 


he took a steady aim at his room and gained the door cat. 
like. The door resisted. He was appalled and unstrung in 
a minute. The door was locked. Crossjay felt as if he were 
in the presence of Sir Willoughby. He fled on ricketty legs, 
and had a fall and bumps down half-a-dozen stairs. A door 
opened above. He rushed across the hall to the drawing¬ 
room, invitingly open, and there staggered in darkness to 
the ottoman and rolled himself in something sleek and warm, 
soft as hands of ladies, and redolent of them ; so delicious 
that he hugged the folds about his head and heels. While 
he was endeavouring to think where he was, his legs curled, 
his eyelids shut, and he was in the thick of the day’s adven¬ 
tures, doing yet more wonderful things. 

He heard his own name: that was quite certain. He 
knew that lie heard it with his ears, as he pursued the 
fleetest dreams ever accorded to mortal. It did not mix : it 
was outside him, and like the danger-pole in the ice, which 
the skater shooting hither and yonder comes on again, it 
recurred; and now it marked a point in his career, now it 
caused him to relax his pace; he began to circle, and whirled 
closer round it, until, as at a blow, his heart knocked, he 
tightened himself, thought of bolting, and lay dead-still to 
throb and hearken. 

“Oh! Sir Willoughby,” a voice had said. 

The accents were sharp with alarm. 

‘ My friend! my dearest! ” was the answer, 

{ I came to speak of Crossjay.” 

Will you sit here, on the ottoman ? ” 

“No, I cannot wait. I hoped I had heard Crossjay re¬ 
turn. I would rather not sit down. May I entreat you to 
pardon him when he comes home ? ” 

“ You, and you only, may do so. I permit none else. Of 
Cross jay to-morrow.” 

“He may be lying in the fields. We are anxious.” 

“ The rascal can take pretty good care of himself.” 

“Crossjay is perpetually meeting accidents.” 

“ He shall be indemnified if he has had excess of punish¬ 
ment.” 

“ I think I will say good night, Sir Willoughby.” 

“ When freely and unreservedly you have given me your 
hand.” 


MIDNIGHT 


405 


There was hesitation. 

“ To say good night ? 99 

u I ask for your hand.” 

“Good night, Sir Willoughby.” 

“ You do not give it. You are in doubt ? Still ? What 
language must I use to convince you ? And yet you know 
me. Who knows me but you ? You have always known 
me. You are my home and my temple. Have you forgotten 
your verses for the day of my majority ? 

** * The dawn-star has arisen 
In plenitude of light . . 

“ Do not repeat them, pray ! ” cried Laetitia with a gasp. 

“ I have repeated them to myself a thousand times: in 
India, America, Japan: they were like our English skylark 
carolling to me. 

“ ‘ My heart, now burst thy prison 
With proud aerial flight! *” 

“ Oh! I beg you will not force me to listen to nonsense 
that I wrote when I was a child. Ho more of those most 
foolish lines ! If you knew what it is to write and despise 
one’s writing, you would not distress me. And since you 
will not speak of Crossjay to-night, allow me to retire.” 

“ You know me, and therefore you know my contempt 
for verses, as a rule, Laetitia. But not for yours to me. 
Why should you call them foolish ? They expressed your 
feelings — I hold them sacred. They are something reli¬ 
gious to me, not mere poetry. Perhaps the third verse is 
my favourite ...” 

“ It will be more than I can bear ! 99 

“ You were in earnest when you wrote them ? ” 

“I was very young, very enthusiastic, very silly.” 

“ You were and are my image of constancy! ” 

“ It is an error, Sir Willoughby ; I am far from being the 
same.” 

“ We are all older, I trust wiser. I am, I will own j much 
wiser. Wise at last! I offer you my hand.” 

She did not reply. 

“I offer you my hand and name, Laetitia ! ” 

Ho response. 


406 


THE EGOIST 


“ You think me bound in honour to another ? n 

She was mute. 

“ I am free. Thank heaven! I am free to choose my 
mate — the woman I have always loved ! Freely and un¬ 
reservedly, as I ask you to give your hand, I offer mine. 
You are the mistress of Patterne Hall; my wife! ” 

She had not a word. 

“ My dearest! do you not rightly understand ? The hand 
I am offering you is disengaged. It is offered to the lady I 
respect above all others. I have made the discovery that I 
cannot love without respecting; and as I will not marry 
without loving, it ensues that I am free — I am yours. At 
last ? — your lips move : tell me the words. Have always 
loved , I said. You carry in your bosom the magnet of con¬ 
stancy, and I, in spite of apparent deviations, declare to 
you that I have never ceased to be sensible of the attrac¬ 
tion. And now there is not an impediment. We two 
against the world ! we are one. Let me confess to an old 
foible — perfectly youthful, and you will ascribe it to youth : 
once I desired to absorb. I mistrusted; that was the reason: 
I perceive it. You teach me the difference of an alliance 
with a lady of intellect. The pride I have in you, Laetitia, 
definitively cures me of that insane passion — call it an in¬ 
satiable hunger. I recognize it as a folly of youth. I have, 
as it were, gone the tour, to come home to you — at last ? — 
and live our manly life of comparative equals. At last, 
then ! But remember, that in the younger man you would 
have had a despot — perhaps a jealous despot. Young men, 
I assure you, are orientally inclined in their ideas of love. 
Love gets a bad name from them. We, my Laetitia, do not 
regard love as a selfishness. If it is, it is the essence of 
life. At least it is our selfishness rendered beautiful. I 
talk to you like a man who has found a compatriot in a 
foreign land. It seems to me that I have not opened my 
mouth for an age. I certainly have not unlocked my heart. 
Those who sing for joy are not unintelligible to me. If I 
had not something in me worth saying, I think I should 
sing. In every sense you reconcile me to men and the 
world, Laetitia. Why press you to speak ? I will be the 
speaker. As surely as you know me, I know you; 
and ...” 


MIDNIGHT 


407 


Laetitia burst forth with, “No ! ” 

“ I do not know you ? ” said he, searchingly mellifluous. 

“ Hardly.” 

“ How not ? 99 
“ I am changed.” 

“ In what way ? ” 

“ Deeply.” 

“ Sedater ? ” 

“ Materially.” 

“ Colour will come back: have no fear ; I promise it. If 
ine you want renewing, I have the specific, I, my 



“ Forgive me — will you tell me, Sir Willoughby, whether 
you have broken with Miss Middleton ? ” 

“Rest satisfied, my dear Laetitia. She is as free as I am. 
I can do no more than a man of honour should do. She 
releases me. To-morrow or next day she departs. We, 
Lsetitia, you and I, my love, are home birds. It does not do 
for the home bird to couple with the migratory. The little 
imperceptible change you allude to, is nothing. Italy will 
restore you. I am ready to stake my own health — never 
yet shaken by a doctor of medicine : — I say medicine ad' 
visedly, for there are Doctors of Divinity who would shake 
giants : — that an Italian trip will send you back — that I 
shall bring you home from Italy a blooming bride. You 
sha^e your head — despondently ? My love, I guarantee 
it. Cannot I give you colour ? Behold! Come to the 
light, look in the glass.” 

“I may redden,” said Laetitia. “I suppose that is due 
to the action of the heart. I am changed. Heart, for 
any other purpose, I have not. I am like you, Sir Wil¬ 
loughby, in this: I could not marry without loving, and 
I do not know what love is, except that it is an empty 
dream.” 

“ Marriage, my dearest ...” 

“You are mistaken.” 

“ I will cure you, my Laetitia. Look to me, I am the 
tonic. It is not common confidence, but conviction. I, 
my love, I! ” 

“There is no cure for what I feel, Sir Willoughby.” 

“Spare me the formal prefix, I beg. You place your 


408 


THE EGOIST 


hand in mine, relying on me. I am pledged for the re¬ 
mainder. We end as we began: my request is for your 
hand — your hand in marriage.” 

“I cannot give it.” 

“ To be my wife ! ” 

“It is an honour: T must decline it.” 

“ Are you quite well, Lsetitia ? I propose in the plain¬ 
est terms I can employ, to make you Lady Patterne — 
mine.” 

“I am compelled to refuse.” 

“ Why ? Kefuse ? Your reason ! ” 

“The reason has been named.” 

He took a stride to inspirit his wits. 

“There ’s a madness comes over women at times, I know. 
Answer me, Lsetitia: — by all the evidence a man can have, 
I could swear it: — but answer me: you loved me once?” 

“I was an exceedingly foolish, romantic girl.” 

“ You evade my question: I am serious. Oh! ” he 
walked away from her, booming a sound of utter repudia¬ 
tion of her present imbecility, and hurrying to her side, 
o'aid: “But it was manifest to the whole world! It was a 
legend. To love like Lsetitia Dale, was a current phrase. 
You were an example, a light to women: no one was 
your match for devotion. You were a precious cameo, 
still gazing! And I was the object. You loved me. You 
loved me, you belonged to me, you were mine, my posses¬ 
sion, my jewel; I was prouder of your constancy than of 
anything else that I had on earth. It was a part of the 
order of the universe to me. A doubt of it would have 
disturbed my creed. Why, good heaven! where are we ? 
Is nothing solid on earth ? You loved me ! ” 

“I was childish indeed.” 

“You loved me passionately ! ” 

“Do you insist on shaming me through and through, Sir 
Willoughby ? I have been exposed enough.” 

“You cannot blot out the past: it is written, it is re¬ 
corded. You loved me devotedly, silence is no escape. 
You loved me.” 

“I did.” 

“You never loved me, you shallow woman! *Idid! v 
As if there could be a cessation of a love! What are we 


MIDNIGHT 


409 


to reckon on as ours ? We prize a woman’s love; we guard 
it jealously, we trust to it, dream of it; there is our wealth; 
there is our talisman ! And when we open the casket, it 
has flown ! — barren vacuity ! — we are poorer than dogs. 
As well think of keeping a costly wine in potter’s clay as 
love in the heart of a woman! There are women — women! 
Oh ! they are all of a stamp — coin ! Coin for any hand ! 
It’s a Action, an imposture — they cannot love! They 
are the shadows of men. Compared with men, they have 
as much heart in them as the shadow beside the body! 
Laetitia! ” 

“Sir Willoughby.” 

“ You refuse my offer ? ” 

“I must.” 

“You refuse to take me for your husband ?” 

“I cannot be your wife.” 

“You have changed? . . . You have set your heart? 
. . . You could marry ? . . . there is a man ? . . . 
You could marry one! I will have an answer, I am sick 
of evasions. What was in the mind of heaven when 
women were created, will be the riddle to the end of the 
world! Every good man in turn has made the inquiry. 
I have a right to know who robs me — We may try as we 
like to solve it. — Satan is painted laughing! — 1 say I have 
a right to know who robs me. Answer me.” 

“I shall not marry.” 

“That is not an answer.” 

“I love no one.” 

“ You loved me. — You are silent ? — but you confessed 
it. Then you confess it was a love that could die ! Are 
you unable to perceive how that redounds to my discredit ? 
You loved me, you have ceased to love me. In other words, 
you charge me with incapacity to sustain a woman’s love. 
You accuse me of inspiring a miserable passion that cannot 
last a lifetime! You let the world see that I am a man 
to be aimed at for a temporary mark! And simply be¬ 
cause I happen to be in your neighbourhood at an age when 
a young woman is impressionable! You make a public 
example of me as a man for whom women may have a 
caprice, but that is all; he cannot enchain them; he fas¬ 
cinates passingly; they fall off. Is it just, for me to be 


410 


THE EGOIST 


taken up and cast down at your will ? Reflect on that 
scandal! Shadows? Why, a man's shadow is faithful 
to him at least. What are women ? There is not a com- 
parison in nature that does not tower above them ! not 
one that does not hoot at them! I, throughout my life 
guided by absolute deference to their weakness — paying 
them politeness, courtesy — whatever I touch I am happy 
in, except when I touch women ! How is it ? What is 
the mystery ? Some monstrous explanation must exist. 
What can it be ? I am favoured by fortune from my birth 
until I enter into relations with women ! But will you 
be so good as to account for it in your defence of them ? 
Oh! were the relations dishonourable, it would be quite 
another matter. Then they ... I could recount . . . 
I disdain to chronicle such victories. Quite another mat¬ 
ter! But they are flies, and I am something more stable. 
They are flies. I look beyond the day; I owe a duty to 
my line. They are flies. I foresee it, I shall be crossed 
in my fate so long as I fail to shun them — flies! Not 
merely born for the day, I maintain that they are spiritu¬ 
ally ephemeral. — Well, my opinion of your sex is directly 
traceable to you. You may alter it, or fling another of us 
men out on the world with the old bitter experience. 
Consider this, that it is on your head if my ideal of women 
is wrecked. It rests with you to restore it. I love you. 
I discover that you are the one woman I have always 
loved. I come to you, I sue you, and suddenly — you have 
changed! 1 I have changed: I am not the same. ’ What 

can it mean? ‘ I cannot marry: I love no one.' And you 
say you do not know what love is — avowing in the same 
breath that you did love me! Am I the empty dream ? 
My hand, heart, fortune, name, are yours, at your feet: 
you kick them hence. I am here — you reject me. But 
why, for what mortal reason am I here other than my 
faith in your love? You drew me to you, to repel me, 
and have a wretched revenge.” 

“You know it is not that, Sir Willoughby.” 

“Have you any possible suspicion that I am still en¬ 
tangled, not, as I assure you I am, perfectly free in fact 
and in honour ? ” 

“ It is not that.” 


MIDNIGHT 411 

“Name it; for you. see your power. Would you have 
me kneel to you, madam ? ” 

“Oh ! no; it would complete my grief.” 

“You feel grief? Then you believe in my affection, 
and you hurl it away. I have no doubt that as a poetess, 
you would say, love is eternal. And you have loved me. 
And you tell me you love me no more. You are not very 
logical, Laetitia Dale.” 

“Poetesses rarely are: if I am one, which I little pretend 
to be for writing silly verses. I have passed out of that 
delusion, with the rest.” 

“You shall not wrong those dear old days, Laetitia. I 
see them now; when I rode by your cottage and you were 
at your window, pen in hand, your hair straying over your 
forehead. Romantic, yes; not foolish. Why were you 
foolish in thinking of me ? Some day I will commission 
an artist to paint me that portrait of you from my descrip¬ 
tion. And I remember when we first whispered . . . 
I remember your trembling. You have forgotten — I 
remember. I remember our meeting in the park on the 
path to church. I remember the heavenly morning of my 
return from my travels, and the same Laetitia meeting me, 
stedfast and unchangeable. Could I ever forget ? Those 
are ineradicable scenes; pictures of my youth, interwound 
with me. I may say, that as I recede from them, I dwell 
on them the more. Tell me, Laetitia, was there not a 
certain prophecy of your father’s concerning us two? 
I fancy I heard of one. There was one. ” 

“He was an invalid. Elderly people nurse illusions.” 

“Ask yourself, Laetitia, who is the obstacle to the 
fulfilment of his prediction ? — truth, if ever a truth was 
foreseen on earth! You have not changed so far that you 
would feel no pleasure in gratifying him ? I go to him to¬ 
morrow morning with the first light.” 

“You will compel me to follow, and undeceive him.” 

“ Do so, and I denounce an unworthy affection you are 
ashamed to avow.” 

“That would be idle, though it would be base.” 

“ Proof of love, then ! For no one but you should it be 
done, and no one but you dare accuse me of a baseness.” 

“Sir Willoughby, you will let my father die in peace.” 


412 


THE EGOIST 


“He and I together will contrive to persuade you.” 

“ You tempt me to imagine that you want a wife at any 
cost.” 

“You, Laetitia, you.” 

“I am tired,” she said. “It is late, I would rather not 
hear more. I am sorry if I have caused you pain. I sup¬ 
pose you to have spoken with candour. I defend neither 
my sex nor myself. I can only say, I am a woman as 
good as dead: happy to be made happy in my way, but 
so little alive that I cannot realize any other way. As 
for love, I am thankful to have broken a spell. You have 
a younger woman in your mind; I am an old one: I have 
no ambition and no warmth. My utmost prayer is to 
float on the stream — a purely physical desire of life: I 
have no strength to swim. Such a woman is not the wife 
for you, Sir Willoughby. Good night.” 

“One final word. Weigh it. Express no conventional 
regrets. Resolutely you refuse ? ” 

“Resolutely I do.” 

“You refuse ? ” 

“Yes.” 

“ I have sacrificed my pride for nothing ! You refuse ? ” 

“Yes.” 

“Humbled myself! And this is the answer 1 You do 
refuse ? ” 

“I do.” 

“Good night, Lsetitia Dale.” 

He gave her passage. 

“Good night, Sir Willoughby.” 

“I am in your power,” he said in a voice between sup¬ 
plication and menace that laid a claw on her, and she turned 
and replied, — 

“You will not be betrayed.” 

“ I can trust you ? ...” 

“I go home to-morrow before breakfast.” 

“Permit me to escort you upstairs.” 

“ If you please: but I see no one here either to-night oi 
to-morrow.” 

“It is for the privilege of seeing the last of you.” 

They withdrew. 

Young Crossjay listened to the drumming of his head. 


MIDNIGHT 413 

Somewhere in or over the cavity a drummer rattled 
tremendously. 

Sir Willoughby’s laboratory-door shut with a slam. 

Crossjay tumbled himself off the ottoman. He stole up 
to the unclosed drawing-room door, and peeped. Never 
was a boy more thoroughly awakened. His object was to 
get out of the house and go through the night avoiding 
everything human, for he was big with information of a 
character that he knew to be of the nature of gunpowder, 
and he feared to explode. He crossed the hall. In the 
passage to the scullery, he ran against Colonel De Craye. 

“ So there you are,” said the colonel, “I ’ve been hunting 
you.” 

Crossjay related that his bed-room door was locked and 
the key gone, and Sir Willoughby sitting up in the 
laboratory. 

Colonel De Craye took the boy to his own room, where 
Crossjay lay on a sofa, comfortably covered over and snug 
in a swelling pillow; but he was restless; he wanted to 
speak, to bellow, to cry; and he bounced round to his left 
side, and bounced to his right, not knowing what to think, 
except that there was treason to his adored Miss Middleton. 

“Why, my lad, you’re not half a campaigner,” the 
colonel called out to him; attributing his uneasiness to the 
material discomfort of the sofa: and Crossjay had to swal¬ 
low the taunt, bitter though it was. A dim sentiment of 
impropriety in unburdening his overcharged mind on the 
subject of Miss Middleton to Colonel De Craye, restrained 
him from defending himself; and so he heaved and tossed 
about till daybreak. At an early hour, while his hos¬ 
pitable friend, who looked very handsome in profile half 
breast and head above the sheets, continued to slumber, 
Cross jay was on his legs and away. 

“ He says I’m not half a campaigner, and a couple of 
hours of bed are enough for me,” the boy thought proudly, 
and snuffed the springing air of the young sun on the fields. 
A glance back at Patterne Hall dismayed him, for he knew 
not how to act, and he was immoderately combustible, too 
full of knowledge for self-containment; much too zealously- 
excited on behalf of his dear Miss Middleton to keep silent 
for many hours of the day. 


414 


THE EGOIST 


CHAPTER XLI 

THE REV. DR. MIDDLETON, CLARA, AND SIR WILLOUGHBY 

When Master Crossjay tumbled down the stairs, Laetitia 
was in Clara’s room, speculating on the various mishaps 
which might have befallen that battered youngster; and 
Clara listened anxiously after Laetitia had run out, until 
she heard Sir Willoughby’s voice; which in some way 
satisfied her that the boy was not in the house. 

She waited, expecting Miss Dale to return; then un¬ 
dressed, went to bed, tried to sleep. She was tired of 
strife. Strange thoughts for a young head shot through 
her: as, that it is possible for the sense of duty to coun¬ 
teract distaste; and that one may live a life apart from 
one’s admirations and dislikes: she owned the singular 
strength of Sir Willoughby in outwearying: she asked 
herself how much she had gained by struggling: — every 
effort seemed to expend her spirit’s force, and rendered 
her less able to get the clear vision of her prospects, as 
though it had sunk her deeper: the contrary of her inten¬ 
tion to make each further step confirm her liberty. Look¬ 
ing back, she marvelled at the things she had done. 
Looking round, how ineffectual they appeared! She had 
still the great scene of positive rebellion to go through 
with her father. 

The anticipation of that was the cause of her extreme 
discouragement. He had not spoken to her since he be¬ 
came aware of her attempted flight: but the scene was 
coming; and besides the wish not to inflict it on him, as 
well as to escape it herself, the girl’s peculiar unhappiness 
lay in her knowledge that they were alienated and stood 
opposed, owing to one among the more perplexing mascu¬ 
line weaknesses, which she could not hint at, dared barely 
think of, and would not name in her meditations. Divert¬ 
ing to other subjects, she allowed herself to exclaim: 
“ Wine ! wine ! ” in renewed wonder of what there could be 
in wine to entrap venerable men and obscure ^heir judge¬ 
ments. She was too young to consider tha* Jer being very 


DR. MIDDLETON: CLARA: SIR WILLOUGHBY 415 

much in the wrong gave all the importance to the cordial 
glass in a venerable gentleman’s appreciation of his dues. 
Why should he fly from a priceless wine to gratify the 
caprices of a fantastical child guilty of seeking to com¬ 
mit a breach of faith ? He harped on those words. Her 
fault was grave. Ho doubt the wine coloured it to him, 
as a drop or two will do in any cup: still her fault was 
grave. 

She was too young for such considerations. She was 
ready to expatiate on the gravity of her fault, so long as 
the humiliation assisted to her disentanglement: her 
snared nature in the toils would not permit her to reflect 
on it further. She had never accurately perceived it: for 
the reason perhaps that Willoughby had not been moving 
in his appeals: but, admitting the charge of waywardness, 
she had come to terms with conscience, upon the under¬ 
standing that she was to perceive it and regret it and do 
penance for itby-and-by: — by renouncing marriage alto¬ 
gether ? How light a penance ! 

In the morning, she went to Laetitia’s room, knocked and 
had no answer. 

She was informed at the breakfast-table of Miss Dale’s 
departure. The ladies Eleanor and Isabel feared it to be 
a case of urgency at the cottage. No one had seen Vernon, 
and Clara requested Colonel De Craye to walk over to the 
cottage for news of Crossjay. He accepted the commission, 
simply to obey and be in her service: assuring her, how¬ 
ever, that there was no need to be disturbed about the boy. 
He would have told her more, had not Dr. Middleton led 
her out. 

Sir Willoughby marked a lapse of ten minutes by his 
watch. His excellent aunts had ventured a comment on 
his appearance, that frightened him lest he himself should 
be the person to betray his astounding discomfiture. He 
regarded his conduct as an act of madness, and Laetitia’s 
as no less that of a madwoman — happily mad ! Very 
happily mad indeed! Her rejection of his ridiculously 
generous proposal seemed to show an intervening hand in 
his favour, that sent her distraught at the right moment. 
He entirely trusted her to be discreet; but she was a miser¬ 
able creature, who had lost the one last chance offered her 


416 


THE EGOIST 


by Providence, and furnished him with a signal instance 
of the mediocrity of woman’s love. 

Time was flying. In a little while Mrs. Mountstuart 
would arrive. He could not fence her without a design in 
his head; he was destitute of an armoury if he had no 
scheme: he racked the brain only to succeed in rousing 
phantasmal vapours. Her infernal “Twice ! ” would cease 
now to apply to Laetitia: it would be an echo of Lady 
Busshe. Nay, were all in the secret, Thrice jilted ! might 
become the universal roar. And this, he reflected bitterly, 
of a man whom nothing but duty to his line had arrested 
from being the most mischievous of his class with women! 
Such is our reward for uprightness! 

At the expiration of fifteen minutes by his watch, he 
struck a knuckle on the library-door. Dr. Middleton held 
it open to him. 

“You are disengaged, sir?” 

“ The sermon is upon the paragraph which is toned to 
awaken the clerk,” replied the Rev. Doctor. 

Clara was weeping. 

Sir Willoughby drew near her solicitously. 

Dr. Middleton’s mane of silvery hair was in a state 
bearing witness to the vehemence of the sermon, and 
Willoughby said: “I hope, sir, you have not made too 
much of a trifle.” 

“ I believe, sir, that I have produced an effect, and that 
was the point in contemplation.” 

“Clara! my dear Clara!” Willoughby touched her. 

“She sincerely repents her conduct, I may inform you,” 
said Dr. Middleton. 

“My love!” Willoughby whispered. “We have had a 
misunderstanding. I am at a loss to discover where I have 
been guilty, but I take the blame, all the blame. I implore 
you not to weep. Do me the favour to look at me. I 
would not have had you subjected to any interrogation 
whatever.” 

“You are not to blame,” Clara said on a sob. 

“Undoubtedly Willoughby is not to blame. It was not 
he who was bound on a runaway errand in flagrant breach 
of duty and decorum, nor he who inflicted a catarrh on a 
brother of my craft and cloth,” said her father. 


DK. MIDDLETON : CLAEA: SIB WILLOUGHBY 417 


“The clerk, sir, has pronounced Amen,” observed 
Willoughby. 

“And no man is happier to hear an ejaculation that he 
has laboured for with so much sweat of his brow than the 
parson, 1 can assure you,” Dr. Middleton mildly groaned. 
“I have notions of the trouble of Abraham. A sermon of 
that description is an immolation of the parent, however 
it may go with the child.” 

Willoughby soothed his Clara. 

“ I wish I had been here to share it. I might have saved 
you some tears. I may have been hasty in our little 
dissensions. I will acknowledge that I have been. My 
temper is often irascible.” 

“And so is mine!” exclaimed Dr. Middleton. “And 
yet I am not aware that I made the worse husband for it. 
Nor do I rightly comprehend how a probably justly excite- 
able temper can stand for a plea in mitigation of an attempt 
at an outrageous breach of faith.” 

“The sermon is over, sir.” 

“Reverberations ! ” the Rev. Doctor waved his arm pla¬ 
cably. “Take it for thunder heard remote.” 

“Your hand, my love,” Willoughby murmured. 

The hand was not put forth. 

Dr. Middleton remarked the fact. He walked to the 
window, and perceiving the pair in the same position 
when he faced about, he delivered a cough of admonition. 

“It is cruel! ” said Clara. 

“ That the owner of your hand should petition you for 
tfc ? ” inquired her father. 

She sought refuge in a fit of tears. 

Willoughby bent above her, mute. 

“Is a scene that is hardly conceivable as a parent's 
obligation once in a lustrum, to be repeated within the half 
hour ? ” shouted her father. 

She drew up her shoulders and shook; let them fall 
and dropped her head. 

“My dearest! your hand ! ” fluted Willoughby. 

The hand surrendered; it was much like the icicle of a 
sudden thaw. 

Willoughby squeezed it to his ribs. 

Dr. Middleton marched up and down the room with his 


418 


THE EGOIST 


arms locked behind him. The silence between the young 
people seemed to denounce his presence. 

He said cordially: “ Old Hiems has but to withdraw for 
buds to burst. ‘ Jam ver egelidos refert tepores.* The 
sequinoctial fury departs. I will leave you for a term.” 

Clara and Willoughby simultaneously raised their faces 
with opposing expressions. 

“My girl?” her father stood by her, laying gentle hand 
on her. 

“Yes, papa, I will come out to you,” she replied to his 
apology for the rather heavy weight of his vocabulary, 
and smiled. 

“No, sir, I beg you will remain,” said Willoughby. 

“I keep you frost-bound.” 

Clara did not deny it. 

Willoughby emphatically did. 

Then which of them was the more lover-like ? Dr. 
Middleton would for the moment have supposed his 
daughter. 

Clara said: “Shall you be on the lawn, papa?” 

Willoughby interposed. “Stay, sir; give us your 
blessing.” 

“That you have.” Dr. Middleton hastily motioned the 
paternal ceremony in outline. 

“A few minutes, papa,” said Clara. 

“Will she name the day?” came eagerly from Wil¬ 
loughby. 

“I cannot! ” Clara cried in extremity. 

“The day is important on its arrival,” said her father, 
“ but I apprehend the decision to be of the chief importance 
at present. First prime your piece of artillery, my 
friend.” 

“The decision is taken, sir.” 

“Then I will be out of way of the firing. Hit what day 
you please.” 

Clara checked herself on an impetuous exclamation. 
It was done that her father might not be detained. 

Her astute self-compression sharpened Willoughby as 
much as it mortified and terrified him. He understood 
how he would stand in an instant were Dr. Middleton 
absent. Her father was the tribunal she dreaded, and 


DR. MIDDLETON: CLARA: SIR WILLOUGHBY 419 


affairs must be settled and made irrevocable while he was 
with them. To sting the blood of the girl, he called her his 
darling, and half enwound her, shadowing forth a salute. 

She strung her body to submit, seeing her father take it 
as a signal for his immediate retirement. 

Willoughby was upon him before he reached the door. 

“ Hear us out, sir. Do not go. Stay, at my entreaty. 
I fear we have not come to a perfect reconcilement.” 

“If that is your opinion,” said Clara, “it is good reason 
for not distressing my father.” 

“Dr. Middleton, I love your daughter. I wooed her 
and won her; I had your consent to our union, and I was 
the happiest of mankind. In some way, since her coming 
to my house, I know not how — she will not tell me, or 
cannot — I offended. One may be innocent and offend. I 
have never pretended to impeccability, which is an admis¬ 
sion that I may very naturally offend. My appeal to her 
is for an explanation or for pardon. I obtain neither. 
Had our positions been reversed, oh ! not for any real 
offence — not for the worst that can be imagined — I think 
not — I hope not — could I have been tempted to propose 
the dissolution of our engagement. To love is to love, 
with me; an engagement a solemn bond. With all my 
errors I have that merit of utter fidelity — to the world 
laughable! I confess to a multitude of errors; I have that 
single merit, and am not the more estimable in your 
daughter’s eyes on account of it, I fear. In plain words, 
I am, I do not doubt, one of the fools among men; of the 
description of human dog commonly known as faithful — 
whose destiny is that of a tribe. A man who cries out 
when he is hurt is absurd, and I am not asking for sym¬ 
pathy. Call me luckless. But I abhor a breach of faith. 
A broken pledge is hateful to me. I should regard it in 
myself as a form of suicide. There are principles which 
civilized men must contend for. Our social fabric is 
based on them. As my word stands for me, I hold others 
to theirs. If that is not done, the world is more or less 
a carnival of counterfeits. In this instance — Ah! Clara, 
my love ! and you have principles: you have inherited, 
you have been indoctrinated with them: have I, then, in 
my ignorance offended past penitence, that you, of all 


420 


THE EGOIST 


women ? . . . And without being able to name my sin! 
— Not only for what I lose by it, but in the abstract, judi¬ 
cially — apart from the sentiment of personal interest, 
grief, pain, and the possibility of my having to endure 
that which no temptation would induce me to commit: — 
judicially; — I fear, sir, I am a poor forensic orator . . .” 

“The situation, sir, does not demand a Cicero: proceed,” 
said Dr. Middleton, balked in his approving nods at the 
right true things delivered. 

“Judicially, I am bold to say, though it may appear a 
presumption in one suffering acutely, I abhor a breach of 
faith.” 

Dr. Middleton brought his nod down low upon the 
phrase he had anticipated. “ And I,” said he, “ personally, 
and presently, abhor a breach of faith. Judicially ? 
Judicially to examine, judicially to condemn: but does 
the judicial mind detest ? I think, sir, we are not on the 
Bench when we say that we abhor: we have unseated 
ourselves. Yet our abhorrence of bad conduct is very 
certain. You would signify, impersonally: which suffices 
for this exposition of your feelings.” 

He peered at the gentleman under his brows, and re¬ 
sumed: “She has had it, Willoughby; she has had it plain 
Saxon and in uncompromising Olympian. There is, I 
conceive, no necessity to revert to it.” 

“Pardon me, sir, but I am still unforgiven.” 

“You must babble out the rest between you. I am 
about as much at home as a turkey with a pair of pigeons.” 

“Leave us, father,” said Clara. 

“ First join our hands, and let me give you that title, sir.” 

“Reach the good man your hand, my girl; forthright, 
from the shoulder, like a brave boxer. Humour a lover. 
He asks for his own.” 

“It is more than I can do, father.” 

“ How, it is more than you can do ? You are engaged 
to him, a plighted woman.” 

“I do not wish to marry.” 

“The apology is inadequate.” 

“I am unworthy . . .” 

“ Chatter ! chatter ! ” 

“ I beg him to release me.” 


DR. MIDDLETON: CLARA: SIR WILLOUGHBY 421 

“ Lunacy! ” 

“I have no love to give him.” 

“ Have you gone back to your cradle, Clara Middleton ?” 

“Oh! leave us, dear father.” 

“My offence, Clara, my offence! What is it? Will 
you only name it ? ” 

“Father, will you leave us? We can better speak to¬ 
gether . e .” 

“We have spoken, Clara, how often!” Willoughby 
resumed, “with what result? — that you loved me, that 
you have ceased to love me: that your heart was mine, 
that you have withdrawn it, plucked it from me: that 
you request me to consent to a sacrifice involving my 
reputation, my life. And what have I done ? I am the 
same, unchangeable. I loved and love you: my heart 
was yours, and is, and will be yours for ever. You are my 
affianced — that is, my wife. What have I done ?” 

“It is indeed useless,” Clara sighed. 

“ Not useless, my girl, that you should inform this gen¬ 
tleman, your affianced husband, of the ground of the objec¬ 
tion you conceived against him.” 

“I cannot say.” 

“ Do you know ? ” 

“If I could name it, I could hope to overcome it.” 

Dr. Middleton addressed Sir Willoughby. 

“ I verily believe we are directing the girl to dissect a 
caprice. Such things are seen large by these young people, 
but as they have neither organs nor arteries, nor brains, 
nor membranes, dissection and inspection will be alike 
profitlessly practised. Your inquiry is natural for a lover, 
whose passion to enter into relations with the sex is 
ordinarily in proportion to his ignorance of the stuff com¬ 
posing them. At a particular age they traffic in whims: 
which are, I presume, the spiritual of hysterics; and are 
indubitably preferable, so long as they are not pushed 
too far. Examples are not wanting to prove that a flighty 
initiative on the part of the male is a handsome corrective. 
In that case, we should probably have had the roof off the 
house, and the girl now at your feet. Ha! ” 

“Despise me, father. I am punished for ever thinking 
myself the superior of any woman,” said Clara. 


422 


THE EGOIST 


“Your hand out to him, my dear, since he is for a 
formal reconciliation: and I can’t wonder.” 

“Father! I have said I do not ... I have said 1 
cannot . . .” 

“By the most merciful! what? what? the name for iti 
words for it! ” 

“ Do not frown on me, father. I wish him happiness. 
I cannot marry him. I do not love him.” 

“You will remember that you informed me aforetime 
that you did love him.” 

“ I was ignorant ... I did not know myself. I wish 
him to be happy.” 

“ You deny him the happiness you wish him! ” 

“It would not be for his happiness were I to wed him.” 

“Oh! ” burst from Willoughby. 

“You hear him. He rejects your prediction, Clara 
Middleton.” 

She caught her clasped hands up to her throat. 
“Wretched, wretched, both!” 

“And you have not a word against him, miserable 
girl! ” 

“ Miserable! I am.” 

“ It is the cry of an animal! ” 

u Yes, father.” 

“You feel like one ? Your behaviour is of that shape. 
You have not a word ? ” 

“Against myself: not against him.” 

“ And I, when you speak so generously, am to yield you ? 
give you up ? ” cried W illoughby. “ Ah! my love, my 
Clara, impose what you will on me; not that. It is too 
much for man. It is, I swear it, beyond my strength.” 

“Pursue, continue the strain: ’t is in the right key,” 
said Dr. Middleton, departing. 

Willoughby wheeled and waylaid him with a bound. 

“Plead for me, sir; you are all-powerful. Let her be 
mine, she shall be happy, or I will perish for it. I will 
call it on my head. —Impossible! I cannot lose her. Lose 
you, my love? It would be to strip myself of every bless¬ 
ing of body and soul. It would be to deny myself posses¬ 
sion of grace, beauty, wit, all the incomparable charms of 
loveliness of mind and person in woman, and plant myself 


DR. MIDDLETON: CLARA: SIR WILLOUGHBY 423 

In a desert. You are my male, the sum of everything I 
call mine. Clara, I should be less than man to submit to 
such a loss. Consent to it ? But I love you ! I worship 
you ! How can I consent to lose you ? . . .” 

He saw the eyes of the desperately wily young woman 
slink sideways. Dr. Middleton was pacing at ever shorter 
lengths closer by the door. 

“ You hate me ? ” Willoughby sank his voice. 

“ If it should turn to hate ! ” she murmured. 

“ Hatred of your husband ? ” 

“I could not promise,” she murmured more softly in 
her wilyness. 

“ Hatred ? ” he cried aloud, and Dr. Middleton stopped 
in his walk and flung up his head; “Hatred of your hus- 
baud ? of the man you have vowed to love and honour ? 
Oh! no. Once mine, it is not to be feared. I trust to 
my knowledge of your nature; I trust in your blood, I 
trust in your education. Had I nothing else to inspire 
confidence, I could trust in your eyes. And Clara, take 
the confession: I would rather be hated than lose you. 
For if I lose you, you are in another world, out of this 
one holding me in its death-like cold: but if you hate me, 
we are together, we are still together. Any alliance, 
any, in preference to separation! ” 

Clara listened with a critical ear. His language and 
tone were new; and comprehending that they were in part 
addressed to her father, whose phrase: “A breach of 
faith: ” he had so cunningly used, disdain of the actor 
prompted the extreme blunder of her saying — frigidly 
though she said it, — 

“You have not talked to me in this way before.” 

“Finally,” remarked her father, summing up the situa¬ 
tion to settle it from that little speech, “ he talks to you 
in this way now; and you are under my injunction 
stretch your hand out to him for a symbol of union, or to* 
state your objection to that course. He, by your admis 
sion, is at the terminus, and there, failing the why not 
must you join him.” 

Her head whirled. She had been severely flagellated 
and weakened previous to Willoughby’s entrance. Lan¬ 
guage to express her peculiar repulsion eluded her. She 


424 


THE EGOIST 


formed the words, and perceived that they would not 
stand to bear a breath from her father. She perceived too 
that Willoughby was as ready with his agony of supplica¬ 
tion as she with hers. If she had tears for a resource, he 
had gestures, quite as eloquent; and a cry of her loathing 
of the union would fetch a countervailing torrent of the 
man’s love. — What could she say ? he is an Egoist ? The 
epithet has no meaning in such a scene. Invent! 
shrieked the hundred-voiced instinct of dislike within her, 
and alone with her father, alone with Willoughby, she could 
have invented some equivalent, to do her heart justice for 
the injury it sustained in her being unable to name the 
true and immense objection : but the pair in presence para¬ 
lyzed her. She dramatized them each springing forward 
by turns, with crushing rejoinders. The activity of her 
mind revelled in giving them a tongue, but would not do it 
for herself. Then ensued the inevitable consequence of an 
incapacity to speak at the heart’s urgent dictate : heart and 
mind became divided. One throbbed hotly, the other hung 
aloof; and mentally, while the sick inarticulate heart kept 
clamouring, she answered it with all that she imagined for 
those two men to say. And she dropped poison on it to 
still its reproaches: bidding herself remember her fatal 
postponements in order to preserve the seeming of con¬ 
sistency before her father; calling it hypocrite; asking 
herself, what was she ! who loved her ! And thus beating 
down her heart, she completed the mischief with a piercing 
view of the foundation of her father’s advocacy of Wil¬ 
loughby, and more lamentably asked herself what her value 
was, if she stood bereft of respect for her father. 

Keason, on the other hand, was animated by her better 
nature to plead his case against her : she clung to her re¬ 
spect for him, and felt herself drowning with it: and she 
echoed Willoughby consciously, doubling her horror with 
the consciousness, in crying out on a world where the most 
sacred feelings are subject to such lapses. It doubled her 
horror, that she should echo the man; but it proved that 
she was no better than he: only some years younger. 
Those years would soon be outlived: after which, he and 
she would be of a pattern. She was unloved: she did no 
harm to any one by keeping her word to this man: she had 


DR. MIDDLETON: CLARA: SIR WILLOUGHBY 426 


pledged it, and it would be a breach of faith not to keep it. 
No one loved her. Behold the quality of her father’s love! 
To give him happiness was now the principal aim for her, 
her own happiness being decently buried; and here he was 
happy : why should she be the cause of his going and losing 
the poor pleasure he so much enjoyed ? 

The idea of her devotedness flattered her feebleness. She 
betrayed signs of hesitation ; and in hesitating, she looked 
away from a look at Willoughby, thinking (so much against 
her nature was it to resign herself to him) that it would 
not have been so difficult with an ill-favoured man. With 
one horribly ugly, it would have been a horrible exultation 
to cast off her youth and take the fiendish leap. 

Unfortunately for Sir Willoughby, he had his reasons 
for pressing impatience; and seeing her deliberate, seeing 
her hasty look at his fine figure, his opinion of himself com¬ 
bined with his recollection of a particular maxim of the 
Great Book to assure him that her resistance was over: 
chiefly owing, as he supposed, to his physical perfections. 

Frequently indeed, in the contest between gentlemen and 
ladies, have the maxims of the Book stimulated the assail¬ 
ant to victory. They are rosy with blood of victims. To 
hear them is to hear a horn that blows the mort: has blown 
it a thousand times. It is good to remember how often 
they have succeeded, when, for the benefit of some future 
Lady Yauban, who may bestir her wits to gather maxims 
for the inspiriting of the Defence, the circumstance of a 
failure has to be recorded. 

Willoughby could not wait for the melting of the snows. 
He saw full surely the dissolving process; and sincerely 
admiring and coveting her as he did, rashly this ill-fated 
gentleman attempted to precipitate it, and so doing ar¬ 
rested. 

Whence might we draw a note upon yonder maxim, in 
words akin to these : Make certain ere a breath come from 
thee that thou be not a frost. 

“ Mine ! She is mine ! ” he cried: tl mine once more! 
mine utterly! mine eternally ! ” and he followed up his 
devouring exclamations in person as she, less decidedly, 
retreated. She retreated as young ladies should ever do, 
two or three steps, and he would not notice that she had 


426 


THE EGOIST 


become an angry Dian, all arrows: her maidenliness in sur¬ 
rendering pleased him. Grasping one fair hand, he just 
allowed her to edge away from his embrace, crying : “ Not a 
syllable of what I have gone through ! You shall not have 
to explain it, my Clara. I will study you more diligently, 
to be guided by you, my darling. If I offend again, my 
wife will not find it hard to speak what my bride withheld 
— I do not ask why: perhaps not able to weigh the effect 
of her reticence: not at that time, when she was younger 
and less experienced, estimating the sacredness of a plighted 
engagement. It is past, we are one, my dear sir and father. 
You may leave us now.” 

“I profoundly rejoice to hear that 1 may,” said Dr. 
Middleton. 

Clara writhed her captured hand. 

“ No, papa, stay. It is an error, an error. You must 
not leave me. Do not think me utterly, eternally, belong¬ 
ing to any one but you. No one shall say I am his but 
you.” 

“ Are you quicksands, Clara Middleton, that nothing can 
be built on you ? Whither is a flighty head and a shifty 
will carrying the girl ? ” 

“ Clara and I, sir,” said Willoughby. 

“ And so you shall,” said the Doctor, turning about. 

“ Not yet, papa: ” Clara sprang to him. 

“ Why, you, you, you, it was you who craved to be alone 
with Willoughby ! ” her father shouted; “ and here we are 
rounded to our starting-point, with the solitary difference 
that now you do not want to be alone with Willoughby. 
First I am bidden go; next I am pulled back ; and judging 
by collar and coat-tail, I suspect you to be a young woman 
to wear an angel’s temper threadbare before you determine 
upon which one of the tides driving him to and fro you 
intend to launch on yourself. Where is your mind ? ” 

Clara smoothed her forehead. 

“ I wish to please you, papa.” 

“ I request you to please the gentleman who is your ap¬ 
pointed husband.” 

“ I am anxious to perform my duty.” 

“ That should be a satisfactory basis for you, Willoughby; 
— as girls go! ” 


DR. MIDDLETON: CLARA: SIR WILLOUGHBY 427 

“ Let me, sir, simply entreat to have her hand in mine 
before you.” 

“ Why not, Clara ? ” 

“ Why an empty ceremony, papa ? ” 

“ The implication is, that she is prepared for the important 
one, friend Willoughby.” 

“Her hand, sir; the reassurance of her hand in mine 
under your eyes : — after all that I have suffered, I claim it, 
I think I claim it reasonably, to restore me to confidence.” 

“ Quite reasonably; which is not to say, necessarily ; but, 
I will add, justifiably; and it may be, sagaciously, when 
dealing with the volatile.” 

“ And here,” said Willoughby, “ is my hand.” 

Clara recoiled. 

He stepped on. Her father frowned. She lifted both her 
hands from the shrinking elbows, darted a look of repulsion 
at her pursuer, and ran to her father, crying: “ Call it my 
mood! I am volatile, capricious, flighty, very foolish. But 
you see that I attach a real meaning to it, and feel it to be 
binding: I cannot think it an empty ceremony, if it is before 
you. Yes, only be a little considerate to your moody girl. 
She will be in a fitter state in a few hours. Spare me this 
moment; I must collect myself. I thought I was free; 1 
thought he would not press me. If I give my hand hurriedly 
now, I shall, I know, immediately repent it. There is the 
picture of me ! But, papa, I mean to try to be above that, 
and if I go and walk by myself, I shall grow calm to perceive 
where my duty lies ...” 

“In which direction shall you walk ?” said Willoughby. 

“ Wisdom is not upon a particular road,” said Dr. Mid¬ 
dleton. 

“ I have a dread, sir, of that one which leads to the rail¬ 
way-station.” 

“ With some justice! ” Dr. Middleton sighed over his 
daughter. 

Clara coloured to deep crimson: but she was beyond anger, 
and was rather gratified by an offence coming from Wil¬ 
loughby. 

“ I will promise not to leave his grounds, papa.” 

“ My child, you have threatened to be a breaker of prom* 
ises.’* 


428 


THE EGOIST 


“ Oh !” she wailed. “But I will make it a vow to you.” 

“Why not make it a vow to me this moment, for this 
gentleman’s contentment, that he shall be your husband 
within a given period!” 

“I will come to you voluntarily. I burn to be alone.” 

“ I shall lose her ! ” exclaimed Willoughby in heartfelt 
earnest. 

“ How so ? ” said Dr. Middleton. “ I have her, sir, if you 
will favour me by continuing in abeyance.— You will come 
within an hour voluntarily, Clara: and you will either at 
once yield your hand to him, or you will furnish reasons, 
and they must be good ones, for withholding it.” 

“Yes, papa.” 

“You will?” 

“ I will.” 

“ Mind, I say reasons.” 

“ Reasons, papa. If I have none . . 

“ If you have none that are to my satisfaction, you im¬ 
plicitly, and instantly, and cordially obey my command.” 

“ I will obey.” 

“ What more would you require ? ” Dr. Middleton bowed 
to Sir Willoughby in triumph. 

“ Will she . . ” 

“Sir! Sir!” 

“ She is your daughter, sir. I am satisfied.” 

“ She has perchance wrestled with her engagement, as the 
aboriginals of a land newly discovered by a crew of adventu¬ 
rous colonists do battle with the garments imposed on them 
by our considerate civilization; — ultimately to rejoice with 
excessive dignity in the wearing of a battered cocked-hat 
and trowsers not extending to the shanks : but she did not 
break her engagement, sir; and we will anticipate, that 
moderating a young woman’s native wildness, she may, after 
the manner of my comparison, take a similar pride in her 
fortune in good season.” 

Willoughby had not leisure to sound the depth of Dr. 
Middleton’s compliment. He had seen Clara gliding out of 
the room during the delivery; and his fear returned on him 
that, not being won, she was lost. 

“ She has gone; ” her father noticed her absence. “ She 
does not waste time in the mission to procure that astonish- 


A PERCEPTIVE MIND 


429 


ing product of a shallow soil, her reasons; if such be the 
object of her search. But no: it signifies that she deems 
herself to have need of composure — nothing more. No one 
likes to be turned about; we like to turn ourselves about: 
and in the question of an act to be committed, we stipulate 
that it shall be our act — girls and others. After the lapse 
of an hour, it will appear to her as her act. — Happily, Wil¬ 
loughby, we do not dine away from Patterne to-night.” 

“No, sir.” 

“ It may be attributable to a sense of deserving, but I 
could plead guilty to a weakness for old Port to-day.” 

“ There shall be an extra bottle, sir.” 

“ All going favourably with you, as I have no cause to 
doubt,” said Dr. Middleton, with the motion of wafting his 
host out of the library. 


CHAPTER XLII 

SHOWS THE DIVINING ARTS OF A PERCEPTIVE MIND 

Starting from the Hall, a few minutes before Dr. Mid¬ 
dleton and Sir Willoughby had entered the drawing-room 
overnight, Vernon parted company with Colonel De Craye at 
the park-gates, and betook himself to the cottage of the 
Dales, where nothing had been heard of his wanderer; and 
he received the same disappointing reply from Dr. Corney, 
out of the bed-room window of the genial physician, whose 
astonishment at his covering so long a stretch of road at 
night for news of a boy like Crossjay — gifted with the lives 
of a cat — became violent and rapped Punch-like blows on 
the window-sill at Vernon’s refusal to take shelter and rest. 
Vernon’s excuse was that he had “no one but that fellow to 
care for,” and he strode off, naming a farm five miles distant. 
Dr. Corney howled an invitation to early breakfast to him, 
in the event of his passing on his way back, and retired to 
bed to think of him. The result of a variety of conjectures 
caused him to set Vernon down as Miss Middleton’s knight, 
and he felt a strong compassion for his poor friend. 



430 


THE EGOIST 


** Though,” thought he, “ a hopeless attachment is as pretty 
an accompaniment to the tune of life as a gentleman might 
wish to have, for it’s one of those big doses of discord which 
make all the minor ones fit in like an agreeable harmony, 
and so he shuffles along as pleasantly as the fortune-fa¬ 
voured, when they come to compute ! ” 

Sir Willoughby was the fortune-favoured in the little 
doctor’s mind; that high-stepping gentleman having wealth, 
and public consideration, and the most ravishing young lady 
in the world for a bride. Still, though he reckoned all these 
advantages enjoyed by Sir Willoughby at their full value, 
he could imagine the ultimate balance of good fortune to be 
in favour of Vernon. But to do so, he had to reduce the 
whole calculation to the extreme abstract, and feed his lean 
friend, as it were, on dew and roots; and the happy effect 
for Vernon lay in a distant future, on the borders of old age, 
where he was to be blest with his lady’s regretful preference, 
and rejoice in the fruits of good constitutional habits. The 
reviewing mind was Irish. Sir Willoughby was a character 
of man profoundly opposed to Dr. Corney’s nature; the 
latter’s instincts bristled with antagonism — not to his race, 
for Vernon was of the same race, partly of the same blood, 
and Corney loved him: the type of person was the annoy¬ 
ance. And the circumstance of its prevailing successfulness 
in the country where he was placed, while it held him silent 
as if under a law, heaped stores of insurgency in the Celtic 
bosom. Corney contemplating Sir Willoughby, and a trot¬ 
ting kern governed by Strongbow, have a point of likeness 
between them; with the point of difference, that Corney 
was enlightened to know of a friend better adapted for emi¬ 
nent station, and especially better adapted to please a lovely 
lady — could these high-bred Englishwomen but be taught 
to conceive another idea of manliness than the formal 
carved-in-wood idol of their national worship! 

Dr. Corney breakfasted very early, without seeing Ver¬ 
non. He was off to a patient while the first lark of the 
morning carolled above, and the business of the day not yet 
fallen upon men in the shape of cloud, was happily inter¬ 
mixed with nature’s hues and pipings. Turning off the 
highroad up a green lane, an hour later, he beheld a young- 
star prying into a hedge head and arms, by the peculiar 


A PERCEPTIVE MIND 


431 


strenuous twist of whose hinder parts, indicative of a frame 
plunged on the pursuit in hand, he clearly distinguished 
young Crossjay. Out came eggs. The doctor pulled up. 

“ What bird? ” he bellowed. 

“ Yellowhammer," Crossjay yelled back. 

“Now, sir, you'll drop a couple of those eggs in the 
nest." 

“ Don't order me," Crossjay was retorting: “ Oh ! it's 
you, Dr. Corney. Good morning. I said that, because I 
always do drop a couple back. I promised Mr. Whitford I 
would, and Miss Middleton too." 

“ Had breakfast ? ” 

“ Not yet." 

“Not hungry ? " 

“ I should be if I thought about it." 

“Jump up." 

“ I think I’d rather not, Dr. Corney." 

“ And you'll just do what Dr. Corney tells you; and set 
your mind on rashers of curly fat bacon and sweetly-smok¬ 
ing coffee, toast, hot cakes, marmalade and damson-jam. 
Wide go the fellow’s nostrils, and there's water at the dim¬ 
ples of his mouth! Up, my man." 

Cross jay jumped up beside the doctor, who remarked, as 
he touched his horse: “I don’t want a man this morning, 
though I'll enlist you in my service if I do. You’re fond 
of Miss Middleton?" 

Instead of answering, Crossjay heaved the sigh of love 
that bears a burden. 

“ And so am I," pursued the doctor : “You ’ll have to put 
up with a rival. It’s worse than fond: I’m in love with 
her. How do you like that?" 

“ I don't mind how many love her," said Crossjay. 

“You’re worthy of a gratuitous breakfast in the front 
parlour of the best hotel of the place they call Arcadia. 
And how about your bed last night ? " 

“ Pretty middling." 

“ Hard, was it, where the bones have n’t cushion ? " 

“ I don't care for bed. A couple of hours, and that's 
enough for me." 

“ But you ’re fond of Miss Middleton anyhow, and that 'a 
a virtue^" 


432 


THE EGOIST 


To his great surprise, Dr. Corney beheld two big round 
tears force their way out of this tough youngster's eyes, and 
all the while the boy’s face was proud. 

Crossjay said, when he could trust himself to disjoin his 
lips: “ I want to see Mr. Whitford.’’ 

“ Have you got news for him ? ’’ 

“I’ve something to ask him. It’s about what I ought 
to do." 

“ Then, my boy, you have the right name addressed in 
the wrong direction : for I found you turning your shoulders 
on Mr. Whitford. And he has been out of his bed, hunting 
you all the unholy night you’ve made it for him. That’s 
melancholy. What do you say to asking my advice ? 99 

Crossjay sighed. “ I can’t speak to anybody but Mr. 
Whitford." 

“ And you ’re hot to speak to him ? ” 

“I want to.” 

“And I found you running away from him. You’re a 
curiosity, Mr. Cross jay Patterne." 

“ Ah! so’d anybody be who knew as much as I do," said 
Crossjay, with a sober sadness that caused the doctor to 
treat him seriously. 

“ The fact is," he said, “ Mr. Whitford is beating the 
country for you. My best plan will be to drive you to the 
Hall." 

“I’d rather not go to the Hall," Crossjay spoke 
resolutely. 

“You won’t see Miss Middleton anywhere but at the 
Hall." 

“ I don’t want to see Miss Middleton, if I can’t be a bit of 
use to her." 

“No danger threatening the lady, is there ?’’ 

Cross jay treated the question as if it had not been put. 

“Now, tell me,” said Dr. Corney, “would there 
be a chance for me, supposing Miss Middleton were 
disengaged ? ’’ 

The answer was easy. “ I’m sure she would n’t." 

“ And why, sir, are you so cock sure ? " 

There was no saying ; but the doctor pressed for it, and 
at last Cross jay gave his opinion that she would take Mt 
Whitford, 


A PERCEPTIVE MTND 


433 


The doctor asked why; and Crossjay said it was because 
Mr. Whitford was the best man in the world. To which, 
with a lusty “ Amen to that,” Dr. Corney remarked: “ I 
should have fancied Colonel De Craye would have had the 
first chance : he’s more of a lady's man.” 

Crossjay surprised him again by petulantly saying: 
« Don't” 

The boy added: “I don’t want to talk, except about 
birds and things. What a jolly morning it is ! I saw the 
sun rise. No rain to-day. You’re right about hungry, 
Dr. Corney! ” 

The kindly little man swung his whip. Crossjay in¬ 
formed him of his disgrace at the Hall, and of every inci¬ 
dent connected with it, from the tramp to the baronet, save 
Miss Middleton’s adventure, and the night-scene in the 
drawing-room. A strong smell of something left out struck 
Dr. Corney, and he said: “ You ’ll not let Miss Middleton 
know of my affection. After all, it’s only a little bit of 
love. But, as Patrick said to Kathleen, when she owned to 
such a little bit, ‘ that’s the best bit of all! ’ and he was as 
right as I am about hungry.” 

Crossjay scorned to talk of loving, he declared. “I never 
tell Miss Middleton what I feel. Why, there’s Miss Dale’s 
cottage ! ” 

“ It’s nearer to your empty inside than my mansion,” 
said the doctor, “and we’ll stop just to inquire whether a 
bed’s to be had for you there to-night, and if not, I ’ll have 
you with me, and bottle you, and exhibit you, for you ’re a 
rare specimen. Breakfast, you may count on, from Mr. 
Dale. I spy a gentleman.” 

“ It’s Colonel De Craye.” 

“Come after news of you.” 

“ I wonder ! ” 

“ Miss Middleton sends him; of course she does.” 

Crossjay turned his full face to the doctor. “ I have n’t 
seen her for such a long time ! But he saw me last night, 
and he might have told her that, if she’s anxious.— 
Good morning, colonel. I ’ve had a good walk and a capital 
drive, and I’m as hungry as the boat’s crew of Captain 
Bligh.” 

He jumped down. 


m 


THE EGOIST 


The colonel and the doctor saluted smiling. 

“I’ve rung the bell,” said De Craye. 

A maid came to the gate, and upon her steps appeared 
Miss Dale, who flung herself at Crossjay, mingling kisses 
and reproaches. She scarcely raised her face to the colonel 
more than to reply to his greeting, and excuse the hungry 
boy for hurrying indoors to breakfast. 

“ I ’ll wait,” said De Craye. He had seen that she was 
paler than usual. So had Dr. Corney; and the doctor called 
to her concerning her father’s health. She reported that he 
had not yet risen, and took Cross jay to herself. 

“That’s well,” said the doctor, “if the invalid sleeps 
long. The lady is not looking so well, though. But ladies 
vary; they show the mind on the countenance, for want of 
the punching we meet with to conceal it; they ’re like mili¬ 
tary flags for a funeral or a gala; one day furled, and next 
day streaming. Men are ships’ figure-heads, about the same 
for a storm or a calm, and not too handsome, thanks to the 
ocean. It’s an age since we encountered last, colonel: on 
board the Dublin boat, I recollect, and a night it was.” 

“ I recollect that you set me on my legs, doctor.” 

“ Ah, and you ’ll please to notify that Corney’s no quack 
at sea, by favour of the monks of the Chartreuse, whose 
elixir has power to still the waves. And we hear that 
miracles are done with ! ” 

“ Roll a physician and a monk together, doctor ! ” 

“ True : it ’ll be a miracle if they combine. Though the 
cure of the soul is often the entire and total cure of the 
body: and it’s maliciously said, that the body given over to 
our treatment is a signal to set the soul flying. By the 
way, colonel, that boy has a trifle on his mind.” 

“ I suppose he has been worrying a farmer or a game- 
keeper.” 

“ Try him. You ’ll find him tight. He’s got Miss Mid¬ 
dleton on the brain. There’s a bit of a secret; and he’s 
not so cheerful about it.” 

“We ’ll see,” said the colonel. 

Dr. Corney nodded. “I have to visit my patient here 
presently. I’m too early for him: so I ’ll make a call or 
two on the lame birds that are up,” he remarked, and drove 
away. 


A PERCEPTIVE MIND 


185 


De Craye strolled through the garden. He was a gentle¬ 
man of those actively perceptive wits which, if ever they 
reflect, do so by hops and jumps : upon some dancing mirror 
within, we may fancy. He penetrated a plot in a flash; 
and in a flash he formed one; but in both cases, it was after 
long hovering and not over-eager deliberation, by the patient 
exercise of his quick perceptives. The fact that Crossjay 
was considered to have Miss Middleton on the brain, threw 
a series of images of everything relating to Cross jay for the 
last forty hours into relief before him : and as he did not 
in the slightest degree speculate on any one of them, but 
merely shifted and surveyed them, the falcon that he was 
in spirit as well as in his handsome face leisurely allowed 
his instinct to direct him where to strike. A reflective dis¬ 
position has this danger in action, that it commonly pre¬ 
cipitates conjecture for the purpose of working upon 
probabilities with the methods and in the tracks to which 
it is accustomed: and to conjecture rashly is to play into 
the puzzles of the maze. He who can watch circling above 
it awhile, quietly viewing, and collecting in his eye, gathers 
matter that makes the secret thing discourse to the brain 
by weight and balance ; he will get either the right clue or 
none; more frequently none; but he will escape the en¬ 
tanglement of his own cleverness, he will always be nearer 
to the enigma than the guesser or the calculator, and he 
will retain a breadth of vision forfeited by them. He must, 
however, to have his chance of success, be acutely besides 
calmly perceptive, a reader of features, audacious at the 
proper moment. 

De Craye wished to look at Miss Dale. She had returned 
home very suddenly, not, as it appeared, owing to her 
father’s illness: and he remembered a redness of her eye¬ 
lids when he passed her on the corridor one night. She 
sent Crossjay out to him as soon as the boy was well filled. 
He sent Cross jay back with a request. She did not yield 
to it immediately. She stepped to the front door reluct¬ 
antly, and seemed disconcerted. De Craye begged for 
a message to Miss Middleton. There was none to give. 
He persisted. But there was really none at present, she 
said. 

“ You won’t entrust me with the smallest word ? ” said 


m 


THE EGOIST 


he, and set her visibly thinking whether she could despatch 
a word. She could not; she had no heart for messages. 

“ I shall see her in a day or two, Colonel De Craye.” 

“ She will miss you severely.” 

“ We shall soon meet.” 

“ And poor Willoughby ! ” 

Laetitia coloured and stood silent. 

A butterfly of some rarity allured Cross jay. 

“ I fear he has been doing mischief,” she said. “I can¬ 
not get him to look at me.” 

“ His appetite is good ? ” 

“ Very good indeed.” 

De Craye nodded. A boy with a noble appetite is never 
a hopeless lock. 

The colonel and Crossjay lounged over the garden. 

“ And now,” said the colonel, “ we ’ll see if we can’t 
arrange a meeting between you and Miss Middleton. 
You ’re a lucky fellow, for she’s always thinking of you.” 

“ I know I’m always thinking of her,” said Crossjay. 

“ If ever you ’re in a scrape, she’s the person you must 
go to.” 

“ Yes, if I know where she is ! ” 

“ Why, generally she ’ll be at the Hall.” 

There was no reply: Crossjay’s dreadful secret jumped to 
his throat. He certainly was a weaker lock for being full 
of breakfast. 

“ I want to see Mr. Whitford so much,” he said. 

“ Something to tell him ? ” 

“ I don’t know what to do: I don’t understand it! ” The 
secret wriggled to his mouth. He swallowed it down: “ Yes, 
I want to talk to Mr. Whitford.” 

“ He’s another of Miss Middleton’s friends.” 

“ I know he is. He’s true steel.” 

“ We ’re all her friends, Crossjay. I flatter myself I’m a 
Toledo when I’m wanted. How long had you been in the 
house last night before you ran into me ? ” 

“ I don’t know, sir : I fell asleep for some time, and then 
I woke! . . .” 

“ Where did you find yourself ? ” 

“ I was in the drawing-room.” 

“ Come, Crossjay, you’re not a fellow to be scared by 


A PERCEPTIVE MIND 437 

ghosts ? You looked it when you made a dash at my 
midriff.” 

“ I don’t believe there are such things. Do you, colonel ? 
You can’t! ” 

“ There’s no saying. We ’ll hope not; for it would n’t be 
fair fighting. A man with a ghost to back him’d beat any 
ten. We could n’t box him, or play cards, or stand a chance 
with him as a rival in love. Did you, now, catch a sight of 
a ghost ? ” 

“They were n’t ghosts ! ” Crossjay said what he was sure 
of, and his voice pronounced his conviction. 

“ I doubt whether Miss Middleton is particularly happy,” 
remarked the colonel. “ Why ? Why, you upset her, you 
know, now and then.” 

The boy swelled. “ I’d do ... I’d go ... I would n’t 
have her unhappy ... It’s that! that’s it! And I don’t 
know what I ought to do. I wish I could see Mr. Whit- 
ford.” 

“ You get into such headlong scrapes, my lad.” 

“ I was n’t in any scrape yesterday.” 

“So you made yourself up a comfortable bed in the 
drawing-room ? Lucky Sir Willoughby did n’t see you.” 

“ He did n’t, though ! ” 

“ A close shave, was it ? ” 

“ I was under a cover of something silk.” 

“ He woke you ? ” 

“ I suppose he did. I heard him.” 

“ Talking ? ” 

“ He was talking.” 

“ What! talking to himself ? ” 

“ No.” 

The secret threatened Cross jay to be out or suffocate 
him. 

De Craye gave him a respite. 

“You like Sir Willoughby, don’t you?” 

Cross jay produced a still-born affirmative. 

“ He’s kind to you,” said the colonel; “ he’ll set you up 
and look after your interests.” 

“ Yes, I like him,” said Crossjay, with his customary 
rapidity in touching the subject; “I like him; he’s kind, 
and all that, and tips and plays with you, and all that; but 


438 


THE EGOIST 


I never can make out why he would n’t see my father when 
my father came here to see him ten miles, and had to walk 
back ten miles in the rain, to go by rail a long way, down 
home, as far as Devonport, because Sir Willoughby wouldn’t 
see him, though he was at home, my father saw. We all 
thought it so odd: and my father would n’t let us talk much 
about it. My father’s a very brave man.” 

“ Captain Patterne is as brave a man as ever lived,” said 
De Craye. 

“I’m positive you’d like him, colonel.” 

“ I know of his deeds, and I admire him, and that’s a good 
step to liking.” 

He warmed the boy’s thoughts of his father. 

“ Because, what they say at home is, a little bread and 
cheese, and a glass of ale, and a rest, to a poor man — lots of 
great houses will give you that, and we would n’t have asked 
for more than that. My sisters say they think Sir Wil¬ 
loughby must be selfish. He’s awfully proud ; and perhaps 
it was because my father was n’t dressed well enough. But 
what can we do ? We ’re very poor at home, and lots of us, 
and all hungry. My father says he is n’t paid very well for 
his services to the Government. He’s only a marine.” 

“ He’s a hero! ” said De Craye. 

“ He came home very tired, with a cold, and had a doctor. 
But Sir Willoughby did send him money, and mother wished 
to send it back, and my father said she was not like a woman 
— with our big family. He said he thought Sir Willoughby 
an extraordinary man.” 

“ Not at all; very common; indigenous,” said De Craye. 
“The art of cutting is one of the branches of a polite 
education in this country, and you ’ll have to learn it, if you 
expect to be looked on as a gentleman and a Patterne, my 
boy. I begin to see how it is Miss Middleton takes to you 
so. Follow her directions. But I hope you did not listen 
to a private conversation. Miss Middleton would not ap¬ 
prove of that.” 

“ Colonel De Craye, how could I help myself ? I heard 
a lot before I knew what it was. There was poetry ! ” 

“ Still, Crossjay, if it was important! — was it ? ” 

The boy swelled again, and the colonel asked him: “ Does 
Miss Dale know of your having played listener ? ” 


A PERCEPTIVE MIND 


435 


"She!” said Crossjay. “Oh! I couldn’t tell her.” 

He breathed thick : then came a threat of tears. “ She 
wouldn’t do anything to hurt Miss Middleton. I’m sure 
of that. It was n’t her fault. She — there goes Mr. Whit- 
ford ! ” Cross jay bounded away. 

The colonel had no inclination to wait for his return. He 
walked fast up the road, not perspicuously conscious that 
his motive was to be well in advance of Vernon Whitford: 
to whom, after all, the knowledge imparted by Cross jay 
would be of small advantage. That fellow would probably 
trot off to Willoughby to row him for breaking his word to 
Miss Middleton ! There are men, thought De Craye, who 
see nothing, feel nothing. 

He crossed a stile into the wood above the lake, where, as 
he was in the humour to think himself signally lucky, espy¬ 
ing her, he took it as a matter of course that the lady who 
taught his heart to leap should be posted by the Fates. 
And he wondered little at her power, for rarely had the 
world seen such union of princess and sylph as in that 
lady’s figure. She stood holding by a beech-branch, gazing 
down on the water. 

She had not heard him. When she looked she flushed at 
the spectacle of one of her thousand thoughts, but she was 
not startled ; the colour overflowed a grave face. 

“ And ’t is not quite the first time that Willoughby has 
played this trick! ” De Craye said to her, keenly smiling 
with a parted mouth. 

Clara moved her lips to recall remarks introductory to so 
abrupt and strange a plunge. 

He smiled in that peculiar manner of an illuminated 
comic perception : for the moment he was all falcon; and 
he surprised himself more than Clara, who was not in the 
mood to take surprises. It was the sight of her which had 
animated him to strike his game ; he was down on it. 

Another instinct at work (they spring up in twenties 
oftener than in twos when the heart is the hunter) prompted 
him to directness and quickness, to carry her on the flood 
of the discovery. 

She regained something of her mental self-possession as 
soon as she was on a level with a meaning she had not yet 
inspected j but she had to submit to his lead, distinctly per- 


440 


THE EGOIST 


ceiving where its drift divided to the forked currents of 
what might be in his mind and what was in hers. 

“ Miss Middleton, I bear a bit of a likeness to the mes¬ 
senger to the glorious despot — my head is off if I speak not 
true ! Everything I have is on the die. Did I guess wrong 
your wish? — I read it in the dark, by the heart. But 
here ’s a certainty: Willoughby sets you free.” 

“ You have come from him ? ” she could imagine nothing 
else, and she was unable to preserve a disguise; she 
trembled. 

“From Miss Dale.” 

“ Ah ! ” Clara drooped: “ she told me that once.” 

“’Tis the fact that tells it now.” 

“ You have not seen him since you left the house ? ” 

“ Darkly: clear enough: not unlike the hand of destiny 
— through a veil. He offered himself to Miss Dale last 
night, about between the witching hours of twelve and 
one.” 

“ Miss Dale ? . . .” 

“ Would she other ? Could she ? The poor lady has 
languished beyond a decade. She’s love in the feminine 
person.” 

“ Are you speaking seriously, Colonel De Craye ? ” 

“ Would I dare to trifle with you, Miss Middleton ? ” 

“I have reason to know it cannot be.” 

“ If I have a head, it is a fresh and blooming truth. And 
more — I stake my vanity on it! ” 

“ Let me go to her.” She stepped. 

“ Consider,” said he. 

“Miss Dale and I are excellent friends. It would not 
seem indelicate to her. She has a kind of regard for me, 
through Cross jay. — Oh ! can it be ? There must be some 
delusion. You have seen — you wish to be of service to me ; 
you may too easily be deceived. Last night ? — he last 
night . . . ? And this morning ! ” 

“’Tis not the first time our friend has played the trick, 
Miss Middleton.” 

“But this is incredible: that last night . . . and this 
morning, in my father’s presence, he presses! ... You 
have seen Miss Dale ? — Everything is possible of him : 
they were together, I know r . Colonel De Craye, I have not 


A PERCEPTIVE MIND 


441 


tshe slightest chance of concealment with you. I think I 
felt that when I first saw you. Will you let me hear why 
you are so certain ? ” 

“ Miss Middleton, when I first had the honour of looking 
on you, it was in a posture that necessitated my looking up, 
and morally so it has been since. I conceived that Wil¬ 
loughby had won the greatest prize on earth. And next 
I was led to the conclusion that he had won it to lose it. 
Whether he much cares, is the mystery I have n’t leisure to 
fathom. Himself is the principal consideration with him¬ 
self, and ever was.” 

“ You discovered it! ” said Clara. 

“ He uncovered it, ” said De Craye. “ The miracle was, 
that the world wouldn’t see. But the world is a piggy- 
wiggy world for the wealthy fellow who fills a trough for 
it, and that he has always very sagaciously done. Only 
women besides myself have detected him. I have never 
exposed him; I have been an observer pure and simple: 
and because I apprehended another catastrophe — making 
something like the fourth, to my knowledge, one being 
public. . . .” 

“ You knew Miss Durham ?" 

“ And Harry Oxford too. And they ’re a pair as happy 
as blackbirds in a cherry-tree, in a summer sunrise, with the 
owner of the garden asleep. Because of that apprehension 
of mine, I refused the office of best man till Willoughby had 
sent me a third letter. He insisted on my coming. I came, 
saw, and was conquered. I trust with all my soul I did not 
betray myself. I owed that duty to my position of conceal¬ 
ing it. As for entirely hiding that I had used my eyes, I 
can’t say: they must answer for it. ” 

The colonel was using his eyes with an increasing suavity 
that threatened more than sweetness. 

“I believe you have been sincerely kind,” said Clara. 
“ We will descend to the path round the lake.” 

She did not refuse her hand on the descent, and he let it 
escape the moment the service was done. As he was per¬ 
forming the admirable character of the man of honour, he 
had to attend to the observance of details; and sure of her 
though he was beginning to feel, there was a touch of the 
unknown in Clara Middleton which made him fear to stamp 


442 


THE EGOIST 


assurance; despite a barely resistible impulse, coming of bis 
emotions and approved by his maxims. He looked at the 
hand, now a free lady’s hand. Willoughby settled, his 
chance was great. Who else was in the way ? Ho one. 
He counselled himself to wait for her: she might have 
ideas of delicacy. Her face was troubled, speculative; the 
brows clouded, the lips compressed. 

H You have not heard this from Miss Dale ?” she said. 

“ Last night they were together: this morning she fled. 
I saw her this morning distressed. She is unwilling to send 
you a message: she talks vaguely of meeting you some days 
hence. And it is not the first time he has gone to her for 
his consolation.” 

“That is not a proposal,” Clara reflected. “He is too 
prudent. He did not propose to her at the time you men¬ 
tion. Have you not been hasty, Colonel De Craye ? ” 

Shadows crossed her forehead. She glanced in the direc¬ 
tion of the house, and stopped her walk. 

“ Last night, Miss Middleton, there was a listener.” 

“Who?” 

“ Cross jay was under that pretty silk coverlet worked by 
the Miss Patternes. He came home late, found his door 
locked, and dashed downstairs into the drawing-room, where 
he snuggled up and dropped asleep. The two speakers 
woke him; they frightened the poor dear lad in his love for 
you, and after they had gone, he wanted to run out of the 
house, and I met him, just after I had come back from my 
search, bursting, and took him to my room, and laid him on 
the sofa, and abused him for not lying quiet. He was rest¬ 
less as a fish on a bank. When I woke in the morning he 
was off. Dr. Corney came across him somewhere on the 
road and drove him to the cottage. I was ringing the bell. 
Corney told me the boy had you on his brain, and was 
miserable, so Cross jay and I had a talk.” 

“Crossjay did not repeat to you the conversation he had 
heard ? ” said Clara. 

“No.” 

She smiled rejoicingly, proud of the boy, as she walked on. 

“ But you ’ll pardon me, Miss Middleton — and I’m for 
him as much as you are — if I was guilty of a little 
angling.” 


A PERCEPTIVE MIND 


448 


“ My sympathies are with the fish.” 

“The poor fellow had a secret that hurt him. It rose to 
the surface crying to be hooked, and I spared him twice or 
thrice, because he had a sort of holy sentiment I respected, 
that none but Mr. Whitford ought to be his father con¬ 
fessor.” 

“ Crossjay ! ” she cried, hugging her love of the boy. 

“ The secret was one not to be communicated to Miss 
Dale of all people.” 

“ He said that ? ” 

“As good as the very words. She informed me too, that 
she could n’t induce him to face her straight.” 

“ Oh ! that looks like it. And Cross jay was unhappy ? 
Very unhappy ?” 

“He was just where tears are on the brim, and would 
have been over, if he were not such a manly youngster.” 

“ It looks . . .” She reverted in thought to Willoughby, 
and doubted, and blindly stretched hands to her recollec¬ 
tion of the strange old monster she had discovered in him. 
Such a man could do anything. 

That conclusion fortified her to pursue her walk to the 
house and give battle for freedom. Willoughby appeared 
to her scarce human, unreadable, save by the key that she 
could supply. She determined to put faith in Colonel De 
Craye's marvellous divination of circumstances in the dark. 
Marvels are solid weapons when we are attacked by real 
prodigies of nature. Her countenance cleared. She con¬ 
versed with De Craye of the polite and the political world, 
throwing off her personal burden completely, and charming 
him. 

At the edge of the garden, on the bridge that crossed the 
haha from the park, he had a second impulse, almost a 
warning within, to seize his heavenly opportunity to ask for 
thanks and move her tender lowered eyelids to hint at his 
reward. He repressed it, doubtful of the wisdom. 

Something like “ heaven forgives me! ” was in Clara’s 
mind, though she would have declared herself innocent 
before the scrutator. 


444 


THE EGOIST 


CHAPTER XLIII 

IN WHICH SIR WILLOUGHBY IS LED TO THINK THAT THE 
ELEMENTS HAVE CONSPIRED AGAINST HIM 

Clara had not taken many steps in the garden before she 
learnt how great was her debt of gratitude to Colonel De 
Craye. Willoughby and her father were awaiting her. De 
Craye, with his ready comprehension of circumstances, 
turned aside unseen among the shrubs. She advanced 
slowly. 

“ The vapours, we may trust, have dispersed ? ” her father 
hailed her. 

“ One word, and these discussions are over, we dislike 
them equally,” said Willoughby. 

“No scenes,” Dr. Middleton added. “ Speak your decision, 
my girl, pro form&, seeing that he who has the right 
demands it, and pray release me.” 

Clara looked at Willoughby. 

“ I have decided to go to Miss Dale for her advice.” 

There was no appearance in him of a man that has been 
shot. 

“ To Miss Dale ? — for advice ? ” 

Dr. Middleton invoked the Furies. “ What is the signifi¬ 
cation of this new freak ? ” 

“ Miss Dale must be consulted, papa.” 

“ Consulted with reference to the disposal of your hand 
in marriage ? ” 

“ She must be.” 

" Miss Dale, do you say ? ” 

“ I do, papa.” 

Dr. Middleton regained his natural elevation from the 
bend of body habitual with men of an established sanity, 
paedagogues and others, who are called on at odd intervals 
to inspect the magnitude of the infinitesimally absurd in 
human nature : small, that is, under the light of reason, 
immense in the realms of madness. 

His daughter profoundly confused him. He swelled out 
his chest, remarking to Willoughby: “I do not wonder at 


A CONSPIRACY OF THE ELEMENTS 


445 


your scared expression of countenance, my friend. To dis¬ 
cover yourself engaged to a girl as mad as Cassandra, with¬ 
out a boast of the distinction of her being sun-struck, can be 
no specially comfortable enlightenment. I am opposed to 
delays, and I will not have a breach of faith committed by 
daughter of mine.” 

“ Do not repeat those words,” Clara said to Willoughby. 

He started. She had evidently come armed. But how, 
within so short a space ? What could have instructed her ? 
And in his bewilderment he gazed hurriedly above, gulped 
air, and cried: “ Scared, sir ? I am not aware that my 
countenance can show a scare. I am not accustomed to sue 
for long: I am unable to sustain the part of humble suppli¬ 
cant. She puts me out of harmony with creation—We 
are plighted, Clara. It is pure waste of time to speak of 
soliciting advice on the subject.” 

“ Would it be a breach of faith for me to break my 
engagement ? ” she said. 

" You ask ?” 

“ It is a breach of sanity to propound the interrogation,” 
said her father. 

She looked at Willoughby! “ Now ? ” 

He shrugged haughtily. 

“ Since last night ? ” said she. 

“ Last night ? ” 

“ Am I not released ? ” 

“ Not by me.” 

“ By your act.” 

u My dear Clara! ” 

u Have you not virtually disengaged me ? ” 

“ I who claim you as mine ?” 

“ Can you ? ” 

“ I do and must.” 

“ After last night? ” 

“ Tricks! shufflings! Jabber of a barbarian woman upon 
the evolutions of a serpent!” exclaimed Dr. Middleton. 
“ You were to capitulate, or to furnish reasons for your re¬ 
fusal. You have none. Give him your hand, girl, accord¬ 
ing to the compact. I praised you to him for returning 
within the allotted term, and now forbear to disgrace your* 
self and me.” 


446 


THE EGOIST 


“Is lie perfectly free to offer his ? Ask him, papa.” 

“ Perform your duty. Do let us have peace ! ” 

“ Perfectly free! as on the day when I offered it first,” 
Willoughby frankly waved his honourable hand. 

His face was blanched: enemies in the air seemed to have 
whispered things to her: he doubted the fidelity of the 
Powers above. 

“ Since last night ? ” said she. 

“ Oh ! if you insist, I reply, since last night.” 

“ You know what I mean, Sir Willoughby.” 

“Oh! certainly.” 

“ You speak the truth ? ” 

“ 1 Sir Willoughby ’! ” her father ejaculated in wrath. 
“But will you explain what you mean, epitome that you 
are of all the contradictions and mutabilities ascribed to 
women from the beginning! ‘ Certainly,’ he says, and knows 
no more than I. She begs grace for an hour, and returns 
with a fresh store of evasions, to insult the man she has 
injured. It is my humiliation to confess that our share in 
this contract is rescued from public ignominy by his gen¬ 
erosity. Nor can I congratulate him on his fortune, should 
he condescend to bear with you to the utmost; for instead 
of the young woman I supposed myself to be bestowing on 
him, I see a fantastical planguncula enlivened by the 
wanton tempers of a nursery chit. If one may conceive a 
meaning in her, in miserable apology for such behaviour, 
some spirit of jealousy informs the girl.” 

“ I can only remark, that there is no foundation for it,” 
said Willoughby. “ I am willing to satisfy you, Clara. 
Name the person who discomposes you. I can scarcely 
imagine one to exist: but who can tell ? ” 

She could name no person. The detestable imputation of 
jealousy would be confirmed if she mentioned a name : and 
indeed Laetitia was not to be named. 

He pursued his advantage: “Jealousy is one of the fits 
I am a stranger to, — I fancy, sir, that gentlemen have dis¬ 
missed it. I speak for myself. — But I can make allow¬ 
ances. In some cases, it is considered a compliment; and 
often a word will soothe it. The whole affair is so senseless! 
However, I will enter the witness-box, or stand at the pris¬ 
oner’s bar! Anything to quiet a distempered mind.” 


A CONSPIRACY OF THE ELEMENTS 


447 


“Of you, sir,” said Dr. Middleton, “might a parent be 
justly proud.” 

“ It is not jealousy; I could not be jealous! ” Clara 
cried, stung by the very passion; and she ran through her 
brain for a suggestion to win a sign of meltingness if not 
esteem from her father. She was not an iron maiden, 
but one among the nervous natures which live largely in 
the moment, though she was then sacrificing it to her 
nature’s deep dislike. “You may be proud of me again, 
papa.” 

She could hardly have uttered anything more impolitic. 

“ Optume: but deliver yourself ad rem,” he rejoined, 
alarmingly pacified. “ Firmavit fidem. Do you likewise, 
and double on us no more like puss in the field.” 

“ I wish to see Miss Dale,” she said. 

Up flew the Rev. Doctor’s arms in wrathful despair re¬ 
sembling an imprecation. 

“ She is at the cottage. You could have seen her,” said 
Willoughby. 

Evidently she had not. 

“Is it untrue, that last night, between twelve o’clock 
and one, in the drawing-room, you proposed marriage to 
Miss Dale ? ” 

He became convinced that she must have stolen down¬ 
stairs during his colloquy with Laetitia, and listened at the 
door. 

“ On behalf of old Vernon ? ” he said, lightly laughing. 
“ The idea is not novel, as you know. They are suited, if 
they could see it. — Laetitia Dale and my cousin Vernon 
Whitford, sir.” 

“ Fairly schemed, my friend, and I will say for you, you 
have the patience, Willoughby — of a husband! ” 

Willoughby bowed to the encomium, and allowed some 
fatigue to be visible. He half yawned: “ I claim no happier 
title, sir,” and made light of the weariful discussion. 

Clara was shaken: she feared that Cross jay had heard 
incorrectly, or that Colonel De Craye had guessed erro¬ 
neously. It was too likely that Willoughby should have 
proposed Vernon to Laetitia. 

There was nothing to reassure her save the vision of the 
panic amazement of his face at her persistency in speaking 


448 


THE EGOIST 


of Miss Dale. She could have declared on oath fchj*t sh* 
was right, while admitting all the suppositions to be against 
her. And unhappily all the Delicacies (a doughty battalion 
for the defence of ladies until they enter into difficulties and 
are shorn of them at a blow, bare as dairymaids), all the 
body-guard of a young gentlewoman, the drawing-room 
sylphides, which bear her train, which wreathe her hair, 
which modulate her voice and tone her complexion, which 
are arrows and shield to awe the creature man, forbade her 
utterance of what she felt, on pain of instant fulfilment of 
their oft-repeated threat of late to leave her to the last 
remnant of a protecting sprite. She could not, as in a dear 
melodrama, from the aim of a pointed finger denounce him, 
on the testimony of her instincts, false of speech, false in 
deed. She could not even declare that she doubted his 
truthfulness. The refuge of a sullen fit, the refuge of tears, 
the pretext of a mood, were denied her now by the rigour 
of those laws of decency which are a garment to ladies of 
pure breeding. 

“ One more respite, papa,” she implored him, bitterly 
conscious of the closer tangle her petition involved, and, if 
it must be betrayed of her, perceiving in an illumination 
how the knot might become so woefully Gordian that haply 
in a cloud of wild events the intervention of a gallant 
gentleman out of heaven, albeit in the likeness of one of 
earth, would have to cut it: her cry within, as she succumbed 
to weakness, being fervider: “ Anything but marry this 
one ! ” She was faint with strife and dejected, a condition 
in the young when their imaginative energies hold revel 
uncontrolled and are projectively desperate. 

“ No respite ! ” said Willoughby genially. 

“And I say, no respite!” observed her father. “You 
have assumed a position that has not been granted you, 
Clara Middleton.” 

“I cannot bear to offend you, father.” 

“Him ! Your duty is not to offend him. Address your 
excuses to him. I refuse to be dragged over the same 
ground, to reiterate the same command perpetually.” 

“If authority is deputed to me, I claim you,” said 
Willoughby. 

“ You have not broken faith with me ? ” 


A CONSPIRACY OF THE ELEMENTS 


449 


u Assuredly not, or would it be possible for me to press 
my claim ? ” 

“ And join the right hand to the right,” said Dr. Mid¬ 
dleton : “ no, it would not be possible. What insane root 
she has been nibbling, I know not, but she must consign 
herself to the guidance of those whom the gods have not 
abandoned, until her intellect is liberated. She was once . .. 
there: I look not back: — if she it was, and no simulacrum 
of a reasonable daughter. I welcome the appearance of my 
friend Mr. Whitford. He is my sea-bath and supper on the 
beach of Troy, after the day’s battle and dust.” 

Vernon walked straight up to them : an act unusual with 
him, for he was shy of committing an intrusion. 

Clara guessed by that, and more by the dancing frown of 
speculative humour he turned on Willoughby, that he had 
come charged in support of her. His forehead was curiously 
lively, as of one who has got a surprise well under, to feed 
on its amusing contents. 

“ Have you seen Cross jay, Mr. Whitford ? ” she said. 

“ I *ve pounced on Cross jay; his bones are sound.” 

“ Where did he sleep ? ” 

“ On a sofa, it seems.” 

She smiled, with good hope —Vernon had the story. 

Willoughby thought it just to himself that he should 
defend his measure of severity. 

“ The boy lied ; he played a double game.” 

“ For which he should have been reasoned with at the 
Grecian portico of a boy,” said the Eev. Doctor. 

“ My system is different, sir. I could not inflict what I 
would not endure myself.” 

“ So is Greek excluded from the later generations ; and 
you leave a field, the most fertile in the moralities in youth, 
unploughed and unsown. Ah! well. This growing too fine 
is our way of relapsing upon barbarism. Beware of over 
sensitiveness, where nature has plainly indicated her alter 
native gateway of knowledge. And now, I presume, I am 
at liberty.” 

“Vernon will excuse us for a minute or two.” 

“I hold by Mr. Whitford now I have him.” 

“I'll join you in the laboratory, Vernon,” Willoughby 
nodded blunts 


450 


no? EGOIST 


“We will leave them, Mr. Whitford. They are at the 
time-honoured dissension upon a particular day, that for 
the sake of dignity, blushes to be named.” 

“ What day ? ” said Vernon, like a rustic. 

“ The day, these people call it.” 

Vernon sent one of his vivid eyeshots from one to the 
other. His eyes fixed on Willoughby’s with a quivering 
glow, beyond amazement, as if his humour stood at furnace 
heat, and absorbed all that came. 

Willoughby motioned him to go. 

“ Have you seen Miss Dale, Mr. Whitford ? ” said Clara. 

He answered: “No. Something has shocked her.” 

“ Is it her feeling for Cross jay ? ” 

“Ah,” Vernon said to Willoughby, “your pocketing of the 
key of Crossjay’s bed-room door was a masterstroke ! ” 

The celestial irony suffused her, and she bathed and swam 
in it, on hearing its dupe reply : “ My methods of discipline 
are short. I was not aware that she had been to his door.” 

“ But I may hope that Miss Dale will see me,” said Clara. 
“ We are in sympathy about the boy.” 

“ Mr. Dale might be seen. He seems to be of a divided 
mind with his daughter,” Vernon rejoined. “ She has 
locked herself up in her room.” 

“ He is not the only father in that unwholesome predica¬ 
ment,” said Dr. Middleton. 

“ He talks of coming to you, Willoughby.” 

“ Why to me ? ” Willoughby chastened his irritation : 
“ He will be welcome, of course. It would be better that 
the boy should come.” 

“ If there is a chance of your forgiving him,” said Clara. 

“ Let the Dales know I am prepared to listen to the boy, 
Vernon. There can be no necessity for Mr. Dale to drag 
himself here.” 

“ How are Mr. Dale and his daughter of a divided mind, 
Mr. Whitford ? ” said Clara. 

Vernon simulated an uneasiness. With a vacant gaze 
that enlarged around Willoughby and was more discomfort¬ 
ing than intentness, he replied : “ Perhaps she is unwilling 
to give him her entire confidence, Miss Middleton.” 

“In which respect, then, our situations present their 
solitary point of unlikeness in resemblance, for I have it in 
excess,” observed Dr- MicUU©W^ 


A CONSPIRACY OP THE ELEMENTS 


451 


Clara dropped her eyelids for the wave to pass over. “ It 
struck me that Miss Dale was a person of the extremest 
candour.’* 

“ Why should we be prying into the domestic affairs of 
the Dales! ” Willoughby interjected, and drew out his 
watch, merely for a diversion; he was on tiptoe to learn 
whether Vernon was as well instructed as Clara, and hung 
to the view that he could not be, while drenching in the 
sensation that he was : — and if so, what were the Powers 
above but a body of conspirators ? He paid Laetitia that 
compliment. He could not conceive the human betrayal of 
the secret. Clara’s discovery of it had set his common 
sense adrift. 

“ The domestic affairs of the Dales do not concern me,” 
said Vernon. 

“And yet, my friend,” Dr. Middleton balanced himself, 
and with an air of benevolent slyness, the import of which 
did not awaken Willoughby until too late, remarked: “ They 
might concern you. I will even add, that there is a prob¬ 
ability of your being not less than the fount and origin of 
this division of father and daughter, though W T illoughby in 
the drawing-room last night stands accuseably the agent.” 

“ Favour me, sir, with an explanation,” said Vernon, 
seeking to gather it from Clara. 

Dr. Middleton threw the explanation upon Willoughby. 

Clara communicated as much as she was able in one 
of those looks of still depth which say, Think ! and with¬ 
out causing a thought to stir, take us into the pellucid 
mind. 

Vernon was enlightened before Willoughby had spoken. 
His mouth shut rigidly, and there was a springing increase 
of the luminous wavering of his eyes. Some star that Clara 
had watched at night was like them in the vivid wink and 
overflow of its light. Yet, as he was perfectly sedate, none 
could have suspected his blood to be chasing wild with 
laughter, and his frame strung to the utmost to keep it from 
volleying. So happy was she in his aspect, that her chief 
anxiety was to recover the name of the star whose shining 
beckons and speaks, and is in the quick of spirit-fire It is 
the sole star which on a night of frost and strong moonlight 
preserves an indomitable fervency: that she remembered. 


452 


THE EGOIST 


and the picture of a hoar earth and a lean Orion in flooded 
heavens, and the star beneath, Eastward of him : but the 
name ! the name ! — She heard Willoughby indistinctly. 

“ Oh, the old story ; another effort; you know my wish * 
a failure, of course, and no thanks on either side, I suppose 
I must ask your excuse. — They neither of them see what ’s 
good for them, sir.” 

“ Manifestly, however,” said Dr. Middleton, “ if one may 
opine from the division we have heard of, the father is 
disposed to back your nominee.” 

“ I can’t say; as far as I am concerned, I made a mess 
of it.” 

Vernon withstood the incitement to acquiesce, but he 
sparkled with his recognition of the fact. 

“ You meant well, Willoughby.” 

“I hope so, Vernon.” 

“ Only you have driven her away.” 

“We must resign ourselves.” 

“ It won’t affect me, for I’m off to-morrow.” 

“ You see, sir, the thanks I get.” 

“ Mr. Whitford,” said Dr. Middleton, “ you have a tower 
of strength in the lady’s father.” 

“Would you have me bring it to bear upon the lady, 
sir ? ” 

“ Wherefore not ? ” 

" To make her marriage a matter of obedience to her 
father ? ” * 

“ Ay, my friend, a lusty lover would have her gladly on 
those terms, well knowing it to be for the lady’s good. What 
do you say, Willoughby ? ” 

“ Sir! Say ? What can I say ? Miss Dale has not 
plighted her faith. Had she done so, she is a lady who 
would never dishonour it.” 

“ She is an ideal of constancy, who would keep to it 
though it had been broken on the other side,” said Vernon, 
and Clara thrilled. 

“ I take that, sir, to be a statue of constancy, modelled 
upon which, a lady of our flesh may be proclaimed as 
graduating for the condition of idiocy,” said Dr. Middleton. 

“ But faith is faith, sir.” 

“ But the broken is the broken, sir, whether in porcelain 


A CONSPIRACY OF THE ELEMENTS 


453 


or in human engagements: and all that the one of the two 
continuing faithful, I should rather say, regretful, can do, 
is to devote the remainder of life to the picking up of the 
fragments ; an occupation properly to be pursued, for the 
comfort of mankind, within the enclosure of an appointed 
asylum.” 

“ You destroy the poetry of sentiment, Dr. Middleton.” 

“ To invigorate the poetry of nature, Mr. Whitford.” 

“ Then you maintain, sir, that when faith is broken by one, 
the engagement ceases, and the other is absolutely free ? ” 

“I do ; I am the champion of that platitude, and sound 
that knell to the sentimental world; and since you have 
chosen to defend it, I will appeal to Willoughby, and ask 
him if he would not side with the world of good sense in 
applauding the nuptials of man or maid married within a 
month of a jilting ? ” 

Clara slipped her arm under her father’s. 

“ Poetry, sir,” said Willoughby, “ I never have been hypo¬ 
crite enough to pretend to understand or care for.” 

Dr. Middleton laughed. Vernon too seemed to admire 
his cousin for a reply that rang in Clara’s ears as the 
dullest ever spoken. Her arm grew cold on her father’s. 
She began to fear Willoughby again. 

He depended entirely on his agility to elude the thrusts 
that assailed him. Had he been able to believe in the 
treachery of the Powers above, he would at once have seen 
design in these deadly strokes, for his feelings had rarely 
been more acute than at the present crisis ; and he would 
then have led away Clara, to wrangle it out with her, re¬ 
lying on Vernon’s friendliness not to betray him to her 
father: but a wrangle with Clara promised no immediate 
fruits, nothing agreeable; and the lifelong trust he had re¬ 
posed in his protecting genii, obscured his intelligence to 
evidence he would otherwise have accepted on the spot, on 
the faith of his delicate susceptibility to the mildest im¬ 
pressions which wounded him. Clara might have stooped to 
listen at the door: she might have heard sufficient to create 
a suspicion. But Vernon was not in the house last night; 
she could not have communicated it to him, and he had not 
seen Laetitia, who was besides trustworthy, an admirable if 
a foolish and ill-fated woman. 


454 


THE EGOIST 


Preferring to consider Vernon a pragmatical moralist 
played upon by a sententious drone, he thought it politic 
to detach them, and vanquish Clara while she was in the 
beaten mood, as she had appeared before Vernon’s vexatious 
arrival. 

“ 1 7 m afraid, my dear fellow, you are rather too dainty and 
fussy for a very successful wooer,” he said. “ It’s beautiful 
on paper, and absurd in life. We have a bit of private busi¬ 
ness to discuss. We will go inside, sir, I think. I will 
soon release you.” 

Clara pressed her father’s arm. 

“ More ? ” said he. 

“Five minutes. There’s a slight delusion to clear, sir. 
My dear Clara, you will see with different eyes.” 

“ Papa wishes to work with Mr. Whitford.” 

Her heart sank to hear her father say: “No, ’t is a lost 
morning. I must consent to pay tax of it for giving another 
young woman to the world. I have a daughter ! You will, 
I hope, compensate me, Mr. Whitford, in the afternoon. Be 
not downcast. I have observed you meditative of late. You 
will have no clear brain so long as that stuff is on the mind. 
I could venture to propose to do some pleading for you, 
should it be needed for the prompter expedition of the 
affair.” 

Vernon briefly thanked him, and said: 

“ Willoughby has exerted all his eloquence, and you see 
the result: you have lost Miss Dale and I have not won her. 
He did everything that one man can do for another in so 
delicate a case : even to the repeating of her famous birth¬ 
day verses to him, to flatter the poetess. His best efforts 
were foiled by the lady’s indisposition for me.” 

“ Behold,” said Dr. Middleton, as Willoughby, electrified 
by the mention of the verses, took a sharp stride or two, 
“ you have in him an advocate who will not be rebuffed by 
one refusal, and I can affirm that he is tenacious, pertinacious 
as are few. Justly so. Not to believe in a lady’s No, is the 
approved method of carrying that fortress built to yield. 
Although unquestionably to have a young man pleading in 
our interests with a lady, counts its objections. Yet Wil¬ 
loughby being notoriously engaged, may be held to enjoy the 
privileges of his elders.” 


A CONSPIRACY OF THE ELEMENTS 455 

“ As an engaged man, sir, he was on a level with his elders 
in pleading on my behalf with Miss Dale,” said Vernon. 

Willoughby strode and muttered. Providence had grown 
mythical in his thoughts, if not malicious : and it is the peril 
of this worship, that the object will wear such an alternative 
aspect when it appears no longer subservient. 

“ Are we coming, sir ? ” he said, and was unheeded. The 
Rev. Doctor would not be defrauded of rolling his billow. 

“ As an honourable gentleman faithful to his own engage¬ 
ment and desirous of establishing his relatives, he deserves, 
in my judgement, the lady’s esteem as well as your cordial 
thanks; nor should a temporary failure dishearten either 
of you, notwithstanding the precipitate retreat of the lady 
from Patterne, and her seclusion in her sanctum on the 
occasion of your recent visit.” 

“ Supposing he had succeeded,” said Vernon, driving Wil¬ 
loughby to frenzy, “ should I have been bound to marry ? ” 

Matter for cogitation was offered to Dr. Middleton. 

“ The proposal was without your sanction ? ” 

“ Entirely.” 

“You admire the lady ?” 

“ Respectfully.” 

“You do not incline to the state ?” 

“ An inch of an angle would exaggerate my inclination.” 

“How long are we to stand and hear this insufferable 
nonsense you talk ?” cried Willoughby. 

“ But if Mr. Whitford was not consulted . . .” Dr. Mid¬ 
dleton said, and was overborne by Willoughby’s hurried: 
“ Oblige me, sir. — Oblige me, my good fellow! ” he swept 
his arm to Vernon, and gestured a conducting hand to 
Clara. 

“ Here is Mrs. Mountstuart! ” she exclaimed. 

Willoughby stared. Was it an irruption of a friend or a 
foe? He doubted, and stood petrified between the double 
question. 

Clara had seen Mrs. Mountstuart and Colonel De Craye 
separating: and now the great lady sailed along the sward 
like a royal barge in festival trim. 

She looked friendly, but friendly to everybody, which 
was always a frost on Willoughby, and terribly friendly to 
Clara. 


456 


THE EGOIST 


Coming up to her she whispered: “ News indeed! Won¬ 
derful ! I could not credit his hint of it yesterday. Are 
you satisfied ? ” 

“Pray, Mrs. Mountstuart, take an opportunity to speak 
to papa,” Clara whispered in return. 

Mrs. Mountstuart bowed to Dr. Middleton, nodded to 
Vernon, and swam upon Willoughby, with: “Is it? But 
is it ? Am I really to believe ? You have ? My dear Sir 
Willoughby ? Beally ? ” 

The confounded gentleman heaved on a bare plank of 
wreck in mid sea. 

He could oppose only a paralyzed smile to the assault. 

His intuitive discretion taught him to fall back a step, 
while she said: “So ! ” the plummet word of our mysterious 
deep fathoms; and he fell back further, saying: “ Madam ? ” 
in a tone advising her to speak low. 

She recovered her volubility, followed his partial retreat 
and dropped her voice, — 

“Impossible to have imagined it as an actual fact! You 
were always full of surprises, but this! this ! Nothing man¬ 
lier, nothing more gentlemanly has ever been done: nothing: 
nothing that so completely changes an untenable situation 
into a comfortable and proper footing for everybody. It is 
what I like : it is what I love: — sound sense ! Men are so 
selfish: one cannot persuade them to be reasonable in such 
positions. But you, Sir Willoughby, have shown wisdom 
and sentiment: the rarest of all combinations in men.” 

“ Where have you ? . . . ” Willoughby contrived to say. 

“ Heard ? The hedges, the housetops, everywhere. All 
the neighbourhood will have it before nightfall. Lady 
Busshe and Lady Culmer will soon be rushing here, and 
declaring they never expected anything else, I do not doubt. 
I am not so pretentious. I beg your excuse for that ‘ twice * 
of mine yesterday. Eveu if it hurt my vanity, I should be 
happy to confess my error: I was utterly out. But then I 
did not reckon on a fatal attachment, I thought men were 
incapable of it. I thought we women were the only poor 
creatures persecuted by a fatality. It is a fatality! You 
tried hard to escape, indeed you did. And she will do 
honour to your final surrender, my dear friend. She is 
gentle, and very clever, very: she is devoted to you: she 


A CONSPIRACY O* THE ELEMENTS 


457 


will entertain excellently. I see her like a flower in sun¬ 
shine. She will expand to a perfect hostess. Patterne will 
shine under her reign; you have my warrant for that. And 
so will you. Yes, you flourish best when adored. It must 
be adoration. You have been under a cloud of late. Years 
ago I said it was a match, when no one supposed you could 
stoop. Lady Busshe would have it was a screen, and she 
was deemed high wisdom. The world will be with you. 
All the women will be : excepting, of course, Lady Busshe, 
whose pride is in prophesy; and she will soon be too glad 
to swell the host. There, my friend, your sincerest and 
oldest admirer congratulates you. I could not contain 
myself; I was compelled to pour forth. And now I must 
go and be talked to by Dr. Middleton. How does he take 
it ? They leave ? ” 

“He is perfectly well,” said Willoughby, aloud, quite 
distraught. 

She acknowledged his just correction of her for running 
on to an extreme in low-toned converse, though they stood 
sufficiently isolated from the others. These had by this 
time been joined by Colonel He Craye, and were all 
chatting in a group — of himself, Willoughby horribly 
suspected. 

Clara was gone from him ! Gone! but he remembered 
his oath and vowed it again : not to Horace De Craye ! She 
was gone, lost, sunk into the world of waters of rival men, 
and he determined that his whole force should be used to 
keep her from that man. the false friend who had sup¬ 
planted him in her shallow heart, and might, if he sue 
ceeded, boast of having done it by simply appearing on the 
scene. 

Willoughby intercepted Mrs. Mountstuart as she was 
passing over to Hr. Middleton: “ My dear lady! spare me 
a minute.” 

He Craye sauntered up, with a face of the friendliest 
humour: “Never was man like you, Willoughby, for shak¬ 
ing new patterns in a kaleidoscope.” 

“ Have you turned punster, Horace ? ” Willoughby re¬ 
plied, smarting to find yet another in the demon secret, 
and he drew Hr. Middleton two or three steps aside, and 
hurriedly begged him to abstain from prosecuting the sub- 


458 


THE EGOIST 


ject with Clara. “We must try to make her happy as we 
best can, sir. She may have her reasons — a young lady’s 
reasons ! ” He laughed, and left the Rev. Doctor consider¬ 
ing within himself under the arch of his lofty frown of 
stupefaction. 

De Craye smiled slyly and winningly as he shadowed a 
deep droop on the bend of his head before Clara, signifying 
his absolute devotion to her service, and this present good 
fruit for witness of his merits. 

She smiled sweetly though vaguely. There was no con¬ 
cealment of their intimacy. 

“ The battle is over,” Vernon said quietly, when Wil¬ 
loughby had walked some paces beside Mrs. Mountstuart, 
adding: “You may expect to see Mr. Dale here. He 
knows.” 

Vernon and Clara exchanged one look, hard on his part, 
in contrast with her softness, and he proceeded to the 
house. 

De Craye waited for a word or a promising look. He was 
patient, being self-assured, and passed on. 

Clara linked her arm with her father’s once more, and 
said, on a sudden brightness: “Sirius, papa!” 

He repeated it in the profoundest manner: “ Sirius! 
And is there,” he asked, “ a feminine scintilla of sense in 
that ? ” 

“ It is the name of the star I was thinking of, dear 
papa.” 

“ It was the star observed by King Agamemnon before 
the sacrifice in Aulis. You were thinking of that ? But, 
my love, my Iphigeneia, you have not a father who will 
insist on sacrificing you.” 

“ Did I hear him tell you to humour me, papa ? ” 

Dr. Middleton humphed. 

“ Verily the dog-star rages in many heads,” he responded. 


THE PATTERNE LADIES 


m 


CHAPTER XLIV 

DR. MIDDLETON : THE LADIES ELEANOR AND ISABEL i 
AND MR. DALE. 

Clara looked up at the flying clouds. She travelled with 
them now, and tasted freedom, but she prudently forebore 
to vex her father; she held herself in reserve. 

They were summoned by the mid-day bell. 

Few were speakers at the meal, few were eaters. Clara 
was impelled to join it by her desire to study Mrs. Mount- 
stuart’s face. Willoughby was obliged to preside. It was 
a meal of an assembly of mutes and plates, that struck the 
ear like the well-known sound of a collection of offerings in 
church after an impressive exhortation from the pulpit. A 
sally of Colonel De Craye’s met the reception given to a 
charity-boy’s muffled burst of animal spirits in the silence 
of the sacred edifice. Willoughby tried politics with Dr. 
Middleton, whose regular appetite preserved him from un¬ 
congenial speculations when the hour for appeasing it had 
come; and he alone did honour to the dishes, replying to 
his host,— 

“ Times are bad, you say, and we have a Ministry doing 
with us what they will. Well, sir, and that being so, and 
opposition a manner of kicking them into greater stability, 
it is the time for wise men to retire within themselves, with 
the steady determination of the seed in the earth to grow. 
Repose upon nature, sleep in firm faith, and abide the 
seasons. That is my counsel to the weaker party.” 

The counsel was excellent, but it killed the topic. 

Dr. Middleton’s appetite was watched for the signal to 
rise and breathe freely ; and such is the grace accorded to a 
good man of an untroubled conscience engaged in doing his 
duty to himself, that he perceived nothing of the general 
restlessness ; he went through the dishes calmly, and as 
calmly he quoted Milton to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel, 
when the company sprang up all at once upon his closing 
his repast. Vernon was taken away from him by Wil* 
loughby. Mrs. Mountstuart beckoned covertly to Clara. 


460 


THE EGOIST 


Willoughby should have had something to say to him, Dr, 
Middleton thought: the position was not clear. But the 
situation was not disagreeable; and he was in no serious 
hurry, though he wished to be enlightened. 

“ This,” Dr. Middleton said to the spinster aunts, as he 
accompanied them to the drawing-room, “ shall be no lost 
day for me if I may devote the remainder of it to you.” 

“ The thunder, we fear, is not remote,” murmured one. 

“We fear it is imminent,” sighed the other. 

They took to chanting in alternation. 

“ — We are accustomed to peruse our Willoughby, and we 
know him by a shadow.” 

“ — From his infancy to his glorious youth and his estab¬ 
lished manhood.” 

“ — He was ever the soul of chivalry.” 

“ — Duty : duty first. The happiness of his family : the 
well-being of his dependents.” 

“ — If proud of his name, it was not an over-weening 
pride ; it was founded in the conscious possession of exalted 
qualities.” 

“ — He could be humble when occasion called for it.” 

Dr. Middleton bowed to the litany, feeling that occasion 
called for humbleness from him. 

“ Let us hope! . . .” he said, with unassumed penitence 
on behalf of his inscrutable daughter. 

The ladies resumed: — 

“—Vernon Whitford, not of his blood, is his brother ! ” 

“ — A thousand instances! Lsetitia Dale remembers 
them better than we.” 

“ — That any blow should strike him ! ” 

“—That another should be in store for him !” 

“ — It seems impossible he can be quite misunderstood !” 

“Let us hope ! . . .” said Dr. Middleton. 

“ — One would not deem it too much for the dispenser of 
goodness to expect to be a little looked up to! ” 

“ — When he was a child he one day mounted a chair, and 
there he stood in danger, would not let us touch him, because 
he was taller than we, and we were to gaze. Do you re¬ 
member him, Eleanor ? ‘ I am the sun of the house ! ’ It 

was inimitable! ” 

“ — Your feelings; he would have your feelings ! He Tvas 


THE PATTERNE LADIES 


461 


fourteen when his cousin Grace Whitford married, and we 
lost him. They had been the greatest friends ; and it was 
long before he appeared among us. He has never cared to 
see her since.” 

“ — But he has befriended her husband. Never has he 
failed in generosity. His only fault is — ” 

“ — His sensitiveness. And that is —” 

“ — His secret. And that — ” 

“ — You are not to discover ! It is the same with him in 
manhood. No one will accuse Willoughby Patterne of a 
deficiency of manliness : but what is it ? — he suffers, as 
none suffer, if he is not loved. He himself is inalterably 
constant in affection.” 

“ — What it is no one can say. We have lived with him 
all his life, and we know him ready to make any sacrifice *. 
only, he does demand the whole heart in return. And if he 
doubts, he looks as we have seen him to-day.” 

“ — Shattered : as we have never seen him look before.” 

“We will hope,” said Dr. Middleton, this time hastily. 
He tingled to say “ what it was ” : he had it in him to solve 
perplexity in their inquiry. He did say, adopting familiar 
speech to suit the theme : “ You know, ladies, we English 
come of a rough stock. A dose of rough dealing in our 
youth does us no harm, braces us. Otherwise we are likely 
to feel chilly : we grow too fine where tenuity of stature is 
necessarily buffetted by gales, namely, in our self-esteem. 
We are barbarians, on a forcing soil of wealth, in a conser¬ 
vatory of comfortable security; but still barbarians. So, 
you see, we shine at our best when we are plucked out of 
that, to where hard blows are given, in a state of war. In 
a state of war we are at home, our men are high-minded 
fellows, Scipios and good legionaries. In the state of peace 
we do not live in peace : our native roughness breaks out in 
unexpected places, under extraordinary aspects — tyrannies, 
extravagances, domestic exactions : and if we have not had 
sharp early training . . . within and without . . . the 
old-fashioned island-instrument to drill into us the civiliza¬ 
tion of our masters, the ancients, we show it by running here 
and there to some excess. Ahem. Yet,” added the Rev. 
Doctor, abandoning his effort to deliver a weighty truth 
obscurely for the comDrehension of dainty spinster ladies, 


462 


THE EGOIST 


the superabundance of whom in England was in his opinion 
largely the cause of our decay as a people, “ Yet I have not 
observed this ultra-sensitiveness in Willoughby. He has 
borne to hear more than I, certainly no example of the 
frailty, could have endured.” 

“ He concealed it,” said the ladies. “ It is intense.” 

“ Then is it a disease ? ” 

“ It bears no explanation; it is mystic.” 

“It is a cultus, then, a form of self-worship.” 

“ Self! ” they ejaculated. “But is not Self indifferent to 
others ? Is it Self that craves for sympathy, love and 
devotion ? ” 

“ He is an admirable host, ladies.” 

“ He is admirable in all respects.” 

“Admirable must he be who can impress discerning 
women, his life-long housemates, so favourably. He is, I 
repeat, a perfect host.” 

“ He will be a perfect husband.” 

“ In all probability.” 

“ It is a certainty. Let him be loved and obeyed, he will 
be guided. That is the secret for her whom he so fatally 
loves. That, if we had dared, we would have hinted to 
her. She will rule him through her love of him, and through 
him all about her. And it will not be a rule he submits to, 
but a love he accepts. If she could see it! ” 

“ If she were a metaphysician ! ” sighed Dr. Middleton. 

“ — But a sensitiveness so keen as his might — ” 

“ — Fretted by an unsympathizing mate — ” 

“ — In the end become, for the best of us is mortal — ” 

“ — Callous ! ” 

“ — He would feel perhaps as much — ” 

“ — Or more ! — ” 

“ — He would still be tender — ” 

“ — But he might grow outwardly hard! ” 

Both ladies looked up at Dr. Middleton, as they revealed 
the dreadful prospect. 

“ It is the story told of corns! ” he said, sad as they. 

The three stood drooping: the ladies with an attempt to 
digest his remark; the Bev. Doctor in dejection lest his 
gallantry should no longer continue to wrestle with his good 
sense. 


THE PATTEItNE LADIES 


465 


He was rescued. 

The door opened and the footman announced, — 

“Mr. Dale.” 

Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel made a sign to one another 
of raising their hands. 

They advanced to him, and welcomed him. 

“Pray be seated, Mr. Dale. You have not brought us 
bad news of our Laetitia ? ” 

“ So rare is the pleasure of welcoming you here, Mr. Dale, 
that we are in some alarm, when, as we trust, it should be 
matter for unmixed congratulation.” 

“ Has Dr. Corney been doing wonders ? ” 

“I am indebted to him for the drive to your house, 
ladies,” said Mr. Dale, a spare, close-buttoned gentleman, 
with an Indian complexion deadened in the sick-chamber. 
“ It is unusual for me to stir from my precincts.” 

“ The Rev. Dr. Middleton.” 

Mr. Dale bowed. He seemed surprised. 

“ You live in a splendid air, sir,” observed the Rev. 
Doctor. 

“I can profit little by it, sir,” replied Mr. Dale. He 
asked the ladies: “ Will Sir Willoughby be disengaged ? ” 

They consulted; “He is with Vernon. We will send to 
him.” 

The bell was rung. 

“I have had the gratification of making the acquaintance 
of your daughter, Mr. Dale, a most estimable lady,” said Dr. 
Middleton. 

Mr. Dale bowed. “ She is honoured by your praises, sir. 
To the best of my belief — I speak as a father — she merits 
them. Hitherto I have had no doubts.” 

“ Of Laetitia ? ” exclaimed the ladies ; and spoke of her 
as gentleness and goodness incarnate. 

“ Hitherto I have devoutly thought so,” said Mr. Dale. 

“ Surely she is the very sweetest nurse, the most devoted 
of daughters! ” 

“ As far as concerns her duty to her father, I can say she 
is that, ladies.” 

“ In all her relations, Mr. Dale! ” 

“ It is my prayer,” he said. 

The footman appeared. He aimounced that Sir Wil- 


THE EGOIST 


4(54 

lough by was in the laboratory with Mr. Whitford, and the 
door locked. 

“ Domestic business,” the ladies remarked. “ You know 
Willoughby’s diligent attention to affairs, Mr. Dale.” 

“ He is well ? ” Mr. Dale inquired. 

“ In excellent health.” 

“ Body and mind ? ” 

“ But, dear Mr. Dale, he is never ill.” 

“ Ah ! For one to hear that who is never well! And Mr. 
Whitford is quite sound ? ” 

“ Sound ? The question alarms me for myself,” said Dr. 
Middleton. “ Sound as our Constitution, the Credit of the 
country, the reputation of our Prince of poets. I pray you 
to have no fears for him.” 

Mr. Dale gave the mild little sniff of a man thrown 
deeper into perplexity. 

He said: “ Mr. Whitford works his head; he is a hard 
student; he may not be always, if I may so put it, at home 
on worldly affairs.” 

“ Dismiss that defamatory legend of the student, Mr. 
Dale; and take my word for it, that he who persistently 
works his head has the strongest for all affairs.” 

“ Ah ! Your daughter, sir, is here ? ” 

“ My daughter is here, sir, and will be most happy to 
present her respects to the father of her friend Miss Dale.” 

“ They are friends ? ” 

“ Very cordial friends.” 

Mr. Dale administered another feebly pacifying sniff to 
himself. 

“ Laetitia! ” he sighed in apostrophe, and swept his fore¬ 
head with a hand seen to shake. 

The ladies asked him anxiously whether he felt the heat 
of the room; and one offered him a smelling-bottle. 

He thanked them. “ I can hold out until Sir Willoughby 
comes.” 

“We fear to disturb him when his door is locked, Mr. 
Dale; but, if you wish it, we will venture on a message. 
You have really no bad news of our Laetitia ? She left us 
hurriedly this morning, without any leave-taking, except 
a word to one of the maids, that your condition required 
her immediate presence.” 


THE PATTERNH LADIES 


46o 


“My condition! And now her door is locked to me ! 
We have spoken through the door, and that is all. I stand 
sick and stupefied between two locked doors, neither of 
which will open, it appears, to give me the enlightenment 
I need more than medicine. ” 

“ Dear me! ” cried Dr. Middleton, “ I am struck by your 
description of your position, Mr. Dale. It would aptly apply 
to our humanity of the present generation; and were these 
the days when I sermonized, I could propose that it should 
afford me an illustration for the pulpit. For my part, when 
doors are closed I try not their locks ; and I attribute my 
perfect equanimity, health even, to an uninquiring accepta¬ 
tion of the fact that they are closed to me. I read my page 
by the light I have. On the contrary, the world of this 
day, if I may presume to quote you for my purpose, is heard 
knocking at those two locked doors of the secret of things 
on each side of us, and is beheld standing sick and stupefied 
because it has got no response to its knocking. Why, sir, 
let the world compare the diverse fortunes of the beggar 
and the postman: knock to give, and it is opened unto you: 
knock to crave, and it continues shut. I say, carry a letter to 
your locked door, and you shall have a good, reception: but 
there is none that is handed out. For which reason . . .” 

Mr. Dale swept a perspiring forehead, and extended his 
hand in supplication. "I am an invalid, Dr. Middleton,” he 
said. “I am unable to cope with analogies. I have but 
strength for the slow digestion of facts.” 

“ For facts, we are bradypeptics to a man, sir. We know 
not yet if nature be a fact or an effort to master one. The 
world has not yet assimilated the first fact it stepped on. 
We are still in the endeavour to make good blood of the fact 
of our being.” 

Pressing his hands at his temples, Mr. Dale moaned: 
a My head twirls ; I did unwisely to come out. I came on 
an impulse; I trust, honourable. I am unfit — I cannot 
follow you, Dr. Middleton. Pardon me.” 

“ Nay, sir, let me say, from my experience of my country¬ 
men, that, if you do not follow me, and can abstain from 
abusing me in consequence, you are magnanimous,” the Rev 
Doctor replied, hardly consenting to let go the man he had 
found to indemnify him for his gallant service of acquies^ 


466 


THE EGOIST 


cing as a mute to the ladies, though he knew his breathing 
robustfulness to be as an East wind to weak nerves, and 
himself an engine of punishment when he had been torn for 
a day from his books. 

Miss Eleanor said: “The enlightenment you need, Mr. 
Dale ? Can we enlighten you ? ” 

“ I think not,” he answered faintly. “ I think I will wait 
for Sir Willoughby ... or Mr. Whitford. If I can keep 
my strength. Or could I exchange — I fear to break down 
— two words with the young lady who is, was . . . ? ” 

“Miss Middleton, my daughter, sir? She shall be at 
your disposition ; I will bring her to you.” Dr. Middleton 
stopped at the window. “ She, it is true, may better know 
the mind of Miss Dale than I. But I flatter myself I know 
the gentleman better. I think, Mr. Dale, addressing you 
as the lady’s father, you will find me a persuasive, I could 
be an impassioned, advocate in his interests.” 

Mr. Dale was confounded; the weakly sapling caught in 
a gust falls back as he did. 

“ Advocate ? ” he said. He had little breath. 

“His impassioned advocate, I repeat: for I have the 
highest opinion of him. You see, sir, I am acquainted with 
the circumstances. I believe,” Dr. Middleton half turned to 
the ladies, “we must, until your potent inducements, Mr. 
Dale, have been joined to my instances, and we overcome 
what feminine scruples there may be, treat the circum¬ 
stances as not generally public. Our Strephon may be 
chargeable with shyness. But if for the present it is incum¬ 
bent on us, in proper consideration for the parties, not to be 
nominally precise, it is hardly requisite in this household 
that we should be. He is now for protesting indifference to 
the state. I fancy we understand that phase of amatory 
frigidity. Erankly, Mr. Dale, I was once in my life myself 
refused by a lady, and I was not indignant, merely indifferent 
to the marriage-tie.” 

11 My daughter has refused him, sir ? ” 

“ Temporarily it would appear that she has declined the 
proposal.” 

“ He was at liberty ? ... he could honourably ? . . .” 

“ His best friend and nearest relative is your guarantee.” 

“I know it; I hear so: I am informed of that; I have 


THE PATTERNE LADIES 


467 


heard of the proposal, and that he could honourably make 
it. Still, I am helpless, I cannot move, until I am assured 
that my daughter’s reasons are such as a father need not 
underline.” 

“ Does the lady, perchance, equivocate ? ” 

“I have not seen her this morning; I rise late. I heal 
an astounding account of the cause for her departure from 
Patterne, and I find her door locked to me — no answer.” 

“ It is that she has no reasons to give, and she feared the 
demand for them.” 

“ Ladies ! ” dolorously exclaimed Mr. Dale. 

“We guess the secret, we guess it!” they exclaimed in 
reply; and they looked smilingly, as Dr. Middleton looked. 

“ She had no reasons to give ? ” Mr. Dale spelt these 
words to his understanding. “ Then, sir, she knew you not 
adverse ? ” 

“ Undoubtedly, by my high esteem for the gentleman, she 
must have known me not adverse. But she would not con¬ 
sider me a principal. She could hardly have conceived me 
an obstacle. I am simply the gentleman's friend. A zealous 
friend, let me add.” 

Mr. Dale put out an imploring hand; it was too much for 
him. 

“Pardon me; I have a poor head. And your daughter 
the same, sir?” 

“ We will not measure it too closely, but I may say, my 
daughter the same, sir. And likewise — may I not add ? — 
these ladies.” 

Mr. Dale made sign that he was overfilled. “Where am 
I! And Laetitia refused him ? ” 

“ Temporarily, let us assume. Will it not partly depend 
on you, Mr. Dale ? ” 

“But what strange things have been happening during 
my daughter’s absence from the cottage ! ” cried Mr. Dale, 
betraying an elixir in his veins. “ I feel that I could laugh 
if I did not dread to be thought insane. She refused his 
hand, and he was at liberty to offer it ? My girl! We are all 
on our heads. The fairy-tales were right and the lesson- 
books were wrong. But it is really, it is really very de¬ 
moralizing. An invalid — and I am one, and no momentary 
exhilaration will be taken for the contrary — clings to the 


468 


THE EGOIST 


idea of stability, order. The slightest disturbance of the 
wonted course of things unsettles him. Why, for years I 
have been prophesying it! and for years I have had every¬ 
thing against me, and now when it is confirmed, I am 
wondering that I must not call myself a fool! ” 

a And for years, dear Mr. Dale, this union, in spite of 
counter-currents and human arrangements, has been our 
Willoughby's constant preoccupation,” said Miss Eleanor. 

“ His most cherished aim,” said Miss Isabel. 

“ The name was not spoken by me,” said Dr. Middleton. 
" But it is out, and perhaps better out, if we would avoid 
the chance of mystifications. I do not suppose we are seri¬ 
ously committing a breach of confidence, though he might 
have wished to mention it to you first himself. I have it 
from Willoughby that last night he appealed to your daugh¬ 
ter, Mr. Dale — not for the first time, if I apprehend him 
correctly; and unsuccessfully. He despairs. I do not: sup¬ 
posing, that is, your assistance vouchsafed to us. And I do 
not despair, because the gentleman is a gentleman of worth, 
of acknowledged worth. You know him well enough to 
grant me that. I will bring you my daughter to help me in 
sounding his praises.” 

Dr. Middleton stepped through the window to the lawn 
on an elastic foot, beaming with the happiness he felt 
charged to confer on his friend Mr. Whitford. 

“ Ladies! it passes all wonders,” Mr. Dale gasped. 

“Willoughby’s generosity does pass all wonders,” they 
said in chorus. 

The door opened: Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer were 
announced. 


CHAPTEB XLY 

THE PATTERNE LADIES : MR. DALE : LADY BUSSHE AND LADY 
culmer: WITH MRS. mountstuart jenkinson 

Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer entered spying to right 
and left. At the sight of Mr. Dale in the room, Lady Busshe 
murmured to her friend : “ Confirmation ! ” 

Lady Culmer murmured: “Corney is quite reliable.” 



A GENERAL ASSEMBLY 


469 


** x’he man is his own best tonic.” 

“ He is invaluable for the country.” 

Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel greeted them. 

The amiability of the Patterne ladies, combined with their 
total eclipse behind their illustrious nephew, invited enter¬ 
prising women of the world to take liberties, and they were 
not backward. 

Lady Busshe said: “ Well ? the news ! we have the out¬ 
lines. Don’t be astonished: we know the points : we have 
heard the gun. I could have told you as much yesterday. 
I saw it. And I guessed it the day before. Oh ! I do believe 
in fatalities now. Lady Culmer and I agree to take that 
view: it is the simplest. Well, and are you satisfied, my 
dears ? ” 

The ladies grimaced interrogatively. “ With what ? ” 

“ With it! with all! with her ! with him ! ” 

“ Our Willoughby ? ” 

“ Can it be possible that they require a dose of Corney ? ” 
Lady Busshe remarked to Lady Culmer. 

“ They play discretion to perfection,” said Lady Culmer. 
“ But, my dears, we are in the secret.” 

“ How did she behave ? ” whispered Lady Busshe. “ No 
high flights and flutters, I do hope. She was well-connected, 
they say ; though I don’t comprehend what they mean by a 
line of scholars —one thinks of a row of pinafores : and she 
was pretty. That is well enough at the start. It never will 
stand against brains. He had the two in the house to con¬ 
trast them, and . . . the result ! A young woman with 
brains — in a house — beats all your Beauties. Lady Culmer 
and I have determined on that view. He thought her a 
delightful partner for a dance, and found her rather tiresome 
at the end of the gallopade. I saw it yesterday, clear as 
daylight. She did not understand him, and he did under¬ 
stand her. That will be our report.” 

“ She is young : she will learn,” said the ladies, uneasily, 
but in total ignorance of her meaning. 

“ And you are charitable, and always were. I remember 
you had a good word for that girl Durham.” 

Lady Busshe crossed the room to Mr. Dale, who was 
turning over leaves of a grand book of the heraldic devices 
of our great Families. 


470 


THE EGOIST 


“ Study it,” she said, “ study it, my dear Mr. Dale; yo* 
are in it, by right of possessing a clever and accomplished 
daughter. At page 300 you will find the Patterne crest. 
And mark me, she will drag you into the Peerage before she 
has done — relatively, you know. Sir Willoughby and wife 
will not be contented to sit down and manage the estates. 
Has not Laetitia immense ambition ? And very creditable, 
I say.” 

Mr. Dale tried to protest something. He shut the book, 
examined the binding, flapped the cover with a finger, 
hoped her ladyship was in good health, alluded to his own 
and the strangeness of the bird out of the cage. 

“You will probably take up your residence here, in a 
larger and handsomer cage, Mr. Dale.” 

He shook his head. “ Do I apprehend . . . ? ” he said. 

“ I know ,” said she. 

“ Dear me, can it be ? ” 

Mr. Dale gazed upward, with the feelings of one awakened 
late to see a world alive in broad daylight. 

Lady Busshe dropped her voice. She took the liberty 
permitted to her with an inferior in station, while treating 
him to a tone of familiarity in acknowledgement of his ex 
pected rise: which is high breeding, or the exact measure¬ 
ment of social dues. 

“ Laetitia will be happy, you may be sure. I love to see a 
long and faithful attachment rewarded — love it! Her tale 
is the triumph of patience. Far above Grizzel! No woman 
will be ashamed of pointing to Lady Patterne. You are 
uncertain? You are in doubt? Let me hear — as low as 
you like. But there is no doubt of the new shifting of the 
scene ? — no doubt of the proposal ? Dear Mr. Dale ! a very 
little louder. You are here because — ? of course you wish 
to see Sir Willoughby. She ? I did not catch you quite. 
She ? ... it seems, you say ? . . .” 

Lady Culmer said to the Patterne ladies, — 

“ You must have had a distressing time. These affairs 
always mount up to a climax, unless people are very well 
bred. We saw it coming. Naturally we did not expect 
such a transformation of brides: who could ? If I had laid 
myself down on my back to think, I should have had it. I 
am unerring when I set to speculating on my back. One 


A GENERAL ASSEMBLY 


471 


is cooler: ideas come; they have not to be forced. That is 
why I am brighter on a dull winter afternoon, on the sofa, 
beside my tea-service, than at any other season. How¬ 
ever, your trouble is over. When did the Middletons 
leave ? ” 

“ The Middletons leave ? ” said the ladies. 

“ Dr. Middleton and his daughter ” 

“ They have not left us.” 

“ The Middletons are here ? ” 

“They are here, yes. Why should they have left 
Patterne ? ” 

“ Why ? ” 

“ Yes. They are likely to stay some days longer.” 

“ Goodness! ” 

“ There is no ground for any report to the contrary, Lady 
Culmer.” 

“ No ground! ” 

Lady Culmer called out to Lady Busshe. 

A cry came back from that startled dame. 

“ She has refused him ! ” 

“ Who?” 

a Sih p Viq« ? ^ 

« She ? — Sir Willoughby ? ” 

“ Refused! — declines the honour.” 

“Oh! never! No, that carries the incredible beyond 
romance ! But is he perfectly at . . . ? ” 

“ Quite, it seems. And she was asked in due form and 
refused.” 

“ No, and no again ! ” 

“ My dear, I have it from Mr. Dale.” 

“ Mr. Dale, what can be the signification of her conduct! ” 
“ Indeed, Lady Culmer,” said Mr. Dale, not unpleasantly 
agitated by the interest he excited, in spite of his astonish¬ 
ment at a public discussion of the matter in this house, “ I 
am in the dark. Her father should know, but I do not. 
Her door is locked to me; I have not seen her. I am abso¬ 
lutely in the dark. I am a recluse. I have forgotten the 
ways of the world. I should have supposed her father 
would first have been addressed.” 

“ Tut-tut. Modern gentlemen are not so formal; they 
are creatures of impulse and take a pride in it. He spoke. 


472 


THF EGOIST 


We settle that. But where did you get this tale of a 
refusal ?” 

“ I have it from Dr. Middleton.” 

“ From Dr. Middleton ! ” shouted Lady Busshe. 

“ The Middletons are here,” said Lady Culmer. 

“ What whirl are we in ? ” Lady Busshe got up, ran two 
or three steps and seated herself in another chair. “ Oh! 
do let us proceed upon system. If not, we shall presently 
be rageing; we shall be dangerous. The Middletons are 
here, and Dr. Middleton himself communicates to Mr. Dale 
that Laetitia Dale has refused the hand of Sir Willoughby, 
who is ostensibly engaged to his own daughter ! And pray, 
Mr. Dale, how did Dr. Middleton speak of it ? Compose 
yourself; there is no violent hurry, though our sympathy 
with you and our interest in all the parties does perhaps 
agitate us a little. Quite at your leisure — speak! ” 

“ Madam . . . Lady Busshe.” Mr. Dale gulped a ball 
in his throat. u I see no reason why I should not speak. I 
do not see how I can have been deluded. The Miss Pat- 
ternes heard him. Dr. Middleton began upon it, not I. I 
was unaware, when I came, that it was a refusal. I had 
been informed that there was a proposal. My authority 
for the tale was positive. The object of my visit was to 
assure myself of the integrity of my daughter’s conduct. 
She had always the highest sense of honour. But passion 
is known to mislead, and there was this most strange report. 
I feared that our humblest apologies were due to Dr. Mid¬ 
dleton and his daughter. I know the charm Laetitia can 
exercise. Madam, in the plainest language, without a pos¬ 
sibility of my misapprehending him, Dr. Middleton spoke 
of himself as the advocate of the suitor for my daughter’s 
hand. I have a poor head. I supposed at once an amicable 
rupture between Sir Willoughby and Miss Middleton, or 
that the version which had reached me of their engagement 
was not strictly accurate. My head is weak. Dr. Mid¬ 
dleton’s language is trying to a head like mine; but I can 
speak positively on the essential points : he spoke of him¬ 
self as ready to be the impassioned advocate of the suitor 
for my daughter’s hand. Those were his words. I under¬ 
stood him to entreat me to intercede with her. Nay, the 
name was mentioned. There was no concealment. I am 


A GENERAL ASSEMBLY 


473 


certain there could not be a misapprehension. And my 
feelings were touched by his anxiety for Sir Willoughby’s 
happiness. I attributed it to a sentiment upon which I need 
not dwell. Impassioned advocate, he said.” 

“ We are in a perfect maelstrom! ” cried Lady Busshe, 
turning to everybody. 

“ It is a complete hurricane! ” cried Lady Culmer. 

A light broke over the faces of the Patterne ladies. They 
exchanged it with one another. 

They had been so shocked as to be almost offended by 
Lady Busshe, but their natural gentleness and habitual 
submission rendered them unequal to the task of checking 
her. 

“ Is it not,” said Miss Eleanor, “ a misunderstanding that 
a change of names will rectify ? ” 

“This is by no means the first occasion,” said Miss 
Isabel, “that Willoughby has pleaded for his cousin 
Vernon. ” 

“ We deplore extremely the painful error into which Mr. 
Dale has fallen.” 

“It springs, we now perceive, from an entire misappre¬ 
hension of Dr. Middleton’s.” 

“ Vernon was in his mind. It was clear to us.” 

“ Impossible that it could have been Willoughby ! ” 

“You seethe impossibility, the error!” 

“ And the Middletons here! ” said Lady Busshe. “ Oh! 
if we leave unilluminated, we shall be the laughing-stock 
of the county. Mr. Dale, please, wake up. Do you see ? 
You may have been mistaken.” 

“Lady Busshe,” he woke up, “I may have mistaken Dr. 
Middleton; he has a language that I can co mpare only to 
a revi^vMlay of the field forces^ Butf I havetEe^story on 
authority~tfiat; T cannot question : it is confirmed by my 
daughter’s unexampled behaviour. And if I live through 
this day I shall look about me as a ghost to-morrow.” 

“ Dear Mr. Dale! ” said the Patterne ladies com¬ 
passionately. 

Lady Busshe murmured to them: “You know the two 
did not agree; they did not get on: I saw it; I predicted 
it.” 

“ She will understand him in time,” said they. 




474 


THE EGOIST 


“ Never. And my belief is, they have parted by consent, 
and Letty Dale wins the day at last. Yes, now I do believe 
it.” 

The ladies maintained a decided negative, but they knew 
too much not to feel perplexed, and they betrayed it, 
though they said: “ Dear Lady Busshe I is it credible, in 
decency ? ” 

“ Dear Mrs. Mountstuart! ” Lady Busshe invoked her 
great rival appearing among them : “ You come most oppor¬ 
tunely ; we are in a state of inextricable confusion : we are 
bordering on frenzy. You, and none but you, can help us. 
You know, you always know; we hang on you. Is there 
any truth in it ? a particle ? ” 

Mrs. Mountstuart seated herself regally. “Ah! Mr. 
Dale ! ” she said, inclining to him. “ Yes, dear Lady Busshe, 
there is a particle.” 

“ Now, do not roast us ! You can; you have the art. I 
have the whole story. That is, I have a part. I mean, I 
have the outlines. I cannot be deceived, but you can fill 
them in, I know you can. I saw it yesterday. Now, tell 
us, tell us. It must be quite true or utterly false. Which 
is it ? ” 

“Be precise.” 

“ His fatality! you called her. Yes, I was sceptical. But 
here we have it all come round again, and if the tale is true, 
I shall own you infallible. Has he ? — and she ? ” 

“Both.” 

“ And the Middletons here ? They have nQt gone ; they 
keep the field. And more astounding, she refuses him ! 
And to add to it, Dr. Middleton intercedes with Mr. Dale 
for Sir Willoughby ! ” 

“ Dr. Middleton intercedes! ” This was rather astonish¬ 
ing to Mrs. Mountstuart. 

“ For Vernon,” Miss Eleanor emphasized. 

“ For Vernon Whitford, his cousin,” said Miss Isabel, still 
more emphatically. 

“Who,” said Mrs. Mountstuart, with a sovereign lift and 
turn of her head, “ speaks of a refusal ? ” 

“ I have it from Mr. Dale,” said Lady Busshe. 

“ I had it, I thought, distinctly from Dr. Middleton,” said 
Mr. Dale. 


A GENERAL ASSEMBLY 475 

“That Willoughby proposed to Lsetitia for his cousin 
Vernon, Dr. Middleton meant,” said Miss Eleanor. 

Her sister followed : “ Hence this really ridiculous mis¬ 
conception ! — sad indeed,” she added, for balm to Mr. Dale. 
“ Willoughby was Vernon’s proxy. His cousin, if not his 
first, is ever the second thought with him.” 

“ But can we continue ? . . .” 

“ Such a discussion! ” 

Mrs. Mountstuart gave them a judicial hearing. They 
were regarded in the county as the most indulgent of non¬ 
entities, and she as little as Lady Busshe was restrained 
from the burning topic in their presence. She pronounced : 

“ Each party is right and each is wrong.” 

A cry : “ I shall shriek ! ” came from Lady Busshe. 

“ Cruel! ” groaned Lady Culmer. 

“ Mixed, you are all wrong. Disentangled, you are each 
of you right. Sir Willoughby does think of his cousin 
Vernon; he is anxious to establish him; he is the author 
of a proposal to that effect.” 

“We know it! ” the Patterne ladies exclaimed. “And 
Laetitia rejected poor Vernpn once more ! ” 

“ Who spoke of Miss Dale’s rejection of Mr. Whitford ? ” 

“Is he not rejected ? ” Lady Culmer inquired. 

“ It is in debate, and at this moment being decided.” 

“ Oh ! do be seated, Mr. Dale,” Lady Busshe implored 
nim, rising to thrust him back to his chair if necessary. 
“Any dislocation, and we are thrown out again ! We must 
hold together if this riddle is ever to be read. Then, dear 
Mrs. Mountstuart, we are to say that there is no truth in the 
other story ? ” 

“ You are to say nothing of the sort, dear Lady Busshe.” 

“ Be merciful! And what of the fatality ? ” 

“ As positive as the Pole to the needle.” 

“ She has not refused him ? ” 

“ Ask your own sagacity.” 

“ Accepted ? ” 

“ Wait.” 

“And all the world's ahead of me! Now, Mrs. Mount¬ 
stuart, you are oracle. Biddles, if you like — only speak! 
If we can’t have corn, give us husks.” 

“ Is any one of us able to anticipate events, Lady Busshe ? ” 


476 


THE EGOIST 


“ Yes. I believe that you are. I bow to you. I do sin¬ 
cerely. So it’s another person for Mr. Whitford ? You nod. 
And it is our Lsetitia for Sir Willoughby ? You smile. You 
would not deceive me ? A very little, and I run about crazed 
and howl at your doors. And Dr. Middleton is made to play 
blind man in the midst ? And the other person is — now I 
see day! An amicable rupture, and a smooth new arrange¬ 
ment ! She has money; she was never the match for our 
hero; never; I saw it yesterday, and before, often: and so 
he hands her over — tuthe-rum-tum-tum, tuthe-rum-tum- 
tum.” Lady Busshe struck a quick march on her knee: 
“ Now isn’t that clever guessing? The shadow of a clue 
for me! And because I know human nature. One peep, 
and I see the combination in a minute. So he keeps the 
money in the family, becomes a benefactor to his cousin by 
getting rid of the girl, and succumbs to his fatality. Bather 
a pity he let it ebb and flow so long. Time counts the tides, 
you know. But it improves the story. I defy any other 
county in the kingdom to produce one fresh and living to 
equal it. Let me tell you I suspected Mr. Whitford, and I 
hinted it yesterday.” 

“Did you indeed!” said Mrs. Mountstuart, humouring 
her excessive acuteness. 

“ I really did. There is that dear good man on his feet 
again. And looks agitated again.” 

Mr. Dale had been compelled both by the lady’s voice and 
his interest in the subject, to listen. He had listened more 
than enough: he was exceedingly nervous. He held on by 
his chair, afraid to quit his moorings, and “ Manners ! ” he 
said to himself unconsciously aloud, as he cogitated on the 
libertine way with which these chartered great ladies of 
the district discussed his daughter. He was heard and un¬ 
noticed. The supposition, if any, would have been that he 
was admonishing himself. 

At this juncture Sir Willoughby entered the drawing¬ 
room by the garden-window, and simultaneously Dr. Mid¬ 
dleton by the door. 


«IR WILLOUGHBY’S GENERALSHIP 


477 


CHAPTER XLVI 

THE SCENE OF SIR WILLOUGHBY’S GENERALSHIP 

History, we may fear, will never know the qualities of 
leadership inherent in Sir Willoughby Patterne to fit him for 
the post of Commander of an army, seeing that he avoided 
the fatigues of the service and preferred the honours be¬ 
stowed in his country upon the quiet administrators of their 
own estates : but his possession of particular gifts, which are 
military, and especially of the proleptic mind, which is the 
stamp and sign-warrant of the heaven-sent General, was dis¬ 
played on every urgent occasion when, in the midst of diffi¬ 
culties likely to have extinguished one less alert than he to 
the threatening aspect of disaster, he had to manoeuvre 
himself. 

He had received no intimation of Mr. Dale’s presence in 
his house, nor of the arrival of the dreaded women Lady 
Busshe and Lady Culmer: his locked door was too great a 
terror to his domestics. Having finished with Vernon, after 
a tedious endeavour to bring the fellow to a sense of the 
policy of the step urged on him, he walked out on the lawn 
with the desire to behold the opening of an interview not 
promising to lead to much, and possibly to profit by its fail¬ 
ure. Clara had been prepared, according to his directions, 
by Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, as Vernon had been pre¬ 
pared by him. His wishes, candidly and kindly expressed 
both to Vernon and Mrs. Mountstuart, were, that since the 
girl appeared disinclined to make him a happy man, she 
would make one of his cousin. Intimating to Mrs. Mount¬ 
stuart that he would be happier without her, he alluded to 
the benefit of the girl’s money to poor old Vernon, the gen¬ 
eral escape from a scandal if old Vernon could manage to 
catch her as she dropped, the harmonious arrangement it 
would be for all parties. And only on the condition of her 
taking Vernon, would he consent to give her up. This he 
said imperatively: adding, that such was the meaning of 
the news she had received relating to Lsetitia Dale. Erom 
what quarter had she received it ? he asked. She shuffled 


478 


THE EGOIST 


in her reply, made a gesture to signify that it was in the ail, 
universal, and fell upon the proposed arrangement. He 
would listen to none of Mrs. Mountstuart’s woman-of-the- 
world instances of the folly of pressing it upon a girl who 
had shown herself a girl of spirit. She foretold the failure. 
He would not be advised; he said: “ It is my scheme ; ” 
and perhaps the look of mad benevolence about it induced 
the lady to try whether there was a chance that it would hit 
the madness in our nature, and somehow succeed or lead to 
a pacification. Sir Willoughby condescended to arrange 
things thus for Clara’s good; he would then proceed to 
realize his own. Such was the face he put upon it. We can 
wear what appearance we please before the world until we are 
found out, nor is the world’s praise knocking upon hollow¬ 
ness always hollow music ; but Mrs. Mountstuart’s laudation 
of his kindness and simplicity disturbed him ; for though he 
had recovered from his rebuff enough to imagine that Laetitia 
could not refuse him under reiterated pressure, he had let it 
be supposed that she was a submissive handmaiden throb¬ 
bing for her elevation; and Mrs. Mountstuart’s belief in it 
afflicted his recent bitter experience; his footing was not 
perfectly secure. Besides, assuming it to be so, he con¬ 
sidered the sort of prize he had won ; and a spasm of down¬ 
right hatred of a world for which we make mighty sacrifices 
to be repaid in a worn, thin, comparatively valueless coin, 
troubled his counting of his gains. Laetitia, it was true, had 
not passed through other hands in coming to him, as Vernon 
would know it to be Clara’s case : time only had worn her: 
but the comfort of the reflection was annoyed by the physical 
contrast of the two. Hence an unusual melancholy in his 
tone that Mrs. Mountstuart thought touching. It had the 
scenic effect on her which greatly contributes to delude the 
wits. She talked of him to Clara as being a man who had 
revealed an unsuspected depth. 

Vernon took the communication curiously. He seemed 
readier to be in love with his benevolent relative than with 
the lady. He was confused, undisguisedly moved, said the 
plan was impossible, out of the question, but thanked Wil¬ 
loughby for the best of intentions, thanked him warmly. 
After saying that the plan was impossible, the comical fel¬ 
low allowed himself to be pushed forth on the lawn to see 


sib Willoughby’s generalship 


479 


how Miss Middleton might have come out of her interview 
with Mrs. Mountstuart. Willoughby observed Mrs. Mount* 
stuart meet him, usher him to the place she had quitted 
among the shrubs, and return to the open turf-spaces. He 
sprang to her. 

“She will listen,” Mrs. Mountstuart said: “she likes 
him, respects him, thinks he is a very sincere friend, clever, 
a scholar, and a good mountaineer; and thinks you mean 
very kindly. So much I have impressed on her, but I have 
not done much for Mr. Whitford.” 

“ She consents to listen,” said Willoughby, snatching at 
that as the death-blow to his friend Horace. 

“ She consents to listen, because you have arranged it so 
that if she declined she would be rather a savage.” 

“ You think it will have no result ? ” 

“None at all.” 

“ Her listening will do.” 

“ And you must be satisfied with it.” 

“We shall see.” 

“‘Anything for peace,’ she says: and I don’t say that a 
gentleman with a tongue would not have a chance. She 
wishes to please you.” 

“Old Vernon has no tongue for women, poor fellow! 
You will have us be spider or fly, and if a man can’t spin 
a web, all he can hope is not to be caught in one. She 
knows his history too, and that won’t be in his favour. 
How did she look when you left them ? ” 

“ Not so bright: like a bit of china that wants dusting. 
She looked a trifle gauche , it struck me; more like a coun¬ 
try girl with the hoyden taming in her than the well-bred 
creature she is. I did not suspect her to have feeling. 
You must remember, Sir Willoughby, that she has obeyed 
your wishes, done her utmost: I do think we may say she 
has made some amends : and if she is to blame she repents, 
and }'ou will not insist too far.” 

“ I do insist,” said he. 

“ Beneficent, but a tyrant! ” 

“ Well, well.” He did not dislike the character. 

They perceived Dr. Middleton wandering over the lawn, 
and Willoughby went to him to put him on the wrong 
track: Mrs. Mountstuart swept into the drawing-room. 


480 


THE EGOIST 


Willoughby quitted the Rev. Doctor, and hung about the 
bower where he supposed his pair of dupes had by this time 
ceased to stutter mutually:—or what if they had found the 
word of harmony ? He could bear that, just bear it. He 
rounded the shrubs, and behold, both had vanished. The 
trellis decorated emptiness. His idea was, that they had 
soon discovered their inability to be turtles: and desiring 
not to lose a moment while Clara was fretted by the scene, 
he rushed to the drawing-room with the hope of lighting 
on her there, getting her to himself, and finally, urgently, 
passionately offering her the sole alternative of what she 
had immediately rejected. Why had he not used passion 
before, instead of limping crippled between temper and 
policy ? He was capable of it: as soon as imagination in 
him conceived his personal feelings unwounded and un¬ 
imperilled, the might of it inspired him with heroical 
confidence, and Clara grateful, Clara softly moved, led him 
to think of Clara melted. Thus anticipating her he burst 
into the room. 

One step there warned him that he was in the jaws of the 
world. We have the phrase, that a man is himself, under 
certain trying circumstances. There is no need to say it of 
Sir Willoughby: he was thrice himself when danger men¬ 
aced, himself inspired him. He could read at a single 
glance the Polyphemus eye in the general head of a com¬ 
pany. Lady Busshe, Lady Culmer, Mrs. Mountstuart, Mr. 
Dale, had a similarity in the variety of their expressions 
that made up one giant eye for him, perfectly, if awfully, 
legible. He discerned the fact that his demon secret was 
abroad, universal. He ascribed it to fate. He was in the 
jaws of the world, on the world’s teeth. This time he 
thought Laetitia must have betrayed him, and bowing to 
Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer, gallantly pressing their 
fingers and responding to their becks and archnesses, he 
ruminated on his defences before he should accost her 
father. He did not want to be alone with the man, and he 
considered how his presence might be made useful. 

“ I am glad to see you, Mr. Dale. Pray, be seated. Is it 
nature asserting her strength ? or the efficacy of medicine ? 
I fancy it can’t be both. You have brought us back your 
daughter ? ” 


SIR WILLOUGHBY’S GENERALSHIP 481 

Mr. Dale sank into a chair, unable to resist the hand 
forcing him. 

“ No, Sir Willoughby, no. I have not; I have not seen 
her since she came home this morning from Patterne.” 

“ Indeed ? She is unwell ? ” 

“ I cannot say. She secludes herself.” 

“Has locked herself in,” said Lady Busshe. 

Willoughby threw her a smile. It made them intimate. 

This was an advantage against the world, but an exposure 
of himself to the abominable woman. 

Dr. Middleton came up to Mr. Dale to apologize for not 
presenting his daughter Clara, whom he could find neither 
in nor out of the house. 

“We have in Mr. Dale, as I suspected,” he said to Wil¬ 
loughby, “a stout ally.” 

“If I may beg two minutes with you, Sir Willoughby,” 
said Mr. Dale. 

“ Your visits are too rare for me to allow of your number¬ 
ing the minutes,” Willoughby replied. “We cannot let 
Mr. Dale escape us now that we have him, I think, Dr. 
Middleton.” 

“Not without ransom,” said the Rev. Doctor. 

Mr. Dale shook his head. “My strength, Sir Willoughby, 
will not sustain me long.” 

“You are at home, Mr. Dale.” 

“Not far from home, in truth, but too far for an invalid 
beginning to grow sensible of weakness.” 

“ You will regard Patterne as your home, Mr. Dale,” 
Willoughby repeated for the world to hear. 

“ Unconditionally ? ” Dr. Middleton inquired with a 
humourous air of dissenting. 

Willoughby gave him a look that was coldly courteous, 
and then he looked at Lady Busshe. She nodded imper¬ 
ceptibly. Her eyebrows rose, and Willoughby returned a 
similar nod. 

Translated, the signs ran thus: — 

“ — Pestered by the Rev. gentleman: — I see you are. Is 
the story I have heard correct ? — Possibly it may err in a 
few details.” 

This was fettering himself in loose manacles. 

But Lady Busshe would not be satisfied with the com- 


482 


THE EGOIST 


pliment of the intimate looks and nods. She thought she 
might still be behind Mrs. Mountstuart; and she was a 
bold woman, and anxious about him, half-crazed by the 
riddle of the pot she was boiling in, and having very few 
minutes to spare. 

Not extremely reticent by nature, privileged by station, 
and made intimate with him by his covert looks, she stood 
up to him. “ One word to an old friend. Which is the 
father of the fortunate creature ? I don’t know how to 
behave to them.” 

No time was afforded him to be disgusted with her vul¬ 
garity and audacity. 

He replied, feeling her rivet his gyves: “ The house will 
be empty to-morrow.” 

“ I see. A decent withdrawal, and very well cloaked. 
We had a tale here of her running off to decline the honour, 
afraid, or on her dignity or something.” 

How was it that the woman was ready to accept the 
altered posture of affairs in his house — if she had received 
a hint of them ? He forgot that he had prepared her in 
self-defence. 

“ From whom did you have that ? ” he asked. 

“Her father. And the lady aunts declare it was the 
cousin she refused ! ” 

Willoughby’s brain turned over. He righted it for action, 
and crossed the room to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. His 
ears tingled. He and his whole story discussed in public! 
Himself unroofed ! And the marvel that he of all men 
should be in such a tangle, naked and blown on, condemned 
to use his cunningest arts to unwind and cover himself, 
struck him as though the lord of his kind were running the 
gauntlet of a legion of imps. He felt their lashes. 

The ladies were talking to Mrs. Mountstuart and Lady 
Culmer of Vernon and the suitableness of Laetitia to a 
scholar. He made sign to them, and both rose. 

“ It is the hour for your drive. To the cottage ! Mr. 
Dale is ill. She must come. Her sick father ! No delay, 
going or returning. Bring her here at once.” 

“Poor man ! ” they sighed : and “ Willoughby,” said one, 
and the other said : “ There is a strange misconception you 
will do well to correct.” 


sir Willoughby’s generalship 483 

They were about to murmur what it was. He swept his 
hand round, and excusing themselves to their guests, 
obediently they retired. 

Lady Busshe at his entreaty remained, and took a seat 
beside Lady Culmer and Mrs. Mountstuart. 

She said to the latter : “You have tried scholars. What 
do you think ?” 

“Excellent, but hard to mix,” was the reply. 

“ I never make experiments,” said Lady Culmer. 

“ Some one must! ” Mrs. Mountstuart groaned over her 
dull dinner-party. 

Lady Busshe consoled her. “ At any rate, the loss of a 
scholar is no loss to the county.” 

“ They are well enough in towns,” Lady Culmer said. 

“ And then I am sure you must have them by them¬ 
selves.” 

“ We have nothing to regret.” 

“ My opinion.” 

The voice of Dr. Middleton in colloquy with Mr. Dale 
swelled on a melodious thunder: “For whom else should I 
plead as the passionate advocate I proclaimed myself to 
you, sir ? There is but one man known to me who would 
move me to back him upon such an adventure. Willough¬ 
by, join me. I am informing Mr. Dale . . .” 

Willoughby stretched his hands out to Mr. Dale to sup¬ 
port him on his legs, though he had shown no sign of a 
wish to rise. 

“ You are feeling unwell, Mr. Dale.” 

“ Do I look very ill, Sir Willoughby ? ” 

“ It will pass. Lsetitia will be with us in twenty 
minutes.” 

Mr. Dale struck his hands in a clasp. He looked alarm¬ 
ingly ill, and satisfactorily revealed to his host how he 
could be made to look so. 

“I was informing Mr. Dale that the petitioner enjoys 
our concurrent good wishes: and mine in no degree less 
than yours, Willoughby,” observed Dr. Middleton, whose 
billows grew the bigger for a check. He supposed himself 
speaking confidentially. “ Ladies have the trick; they have, 
I may say, the natural disposition for playing enigma now 
and again. Pressure is often a sovereign specific. Let it 


484 


THE EGOIST 


be tried upon her all round, from every radiating line of 
the circle. You she refuses. Then I venture to propose 
myself to appeal to her. My daughter has assuredly an 
esteem for the applicant that will animate a woman's 
tongue in such a case. The ladies of the house will not be 
backward. Lastly, if necessary, we trust the lady’s father 
to add his instances. My prescription is, to fatigue her 
negatives; and where no rooted objection exists, I maintain 
it to be the unfailing receipt for the conduct of a siege. 
No woman can say No for ever. The defence has not such 
resources against even a single assailant, and we shall have 
solved the problem of continuous motion before she will 
have learnt to deny in perpetuity. That I stand on.” 

Willoughby glanced at Mrs. Mountstuart. 

“ What is that ? ” she said. “ Treason to our sex, Dr. 
Middleton ? ” 

“ I think I heard, that no woman can say No for ever! ” 
remarked Lady Busshe. 

“To a loyal gentleman, ma’am: assuming the field of the 
recurring request to be not unholy ground; consecrated to 
affirmatives rather.” 

Dr. Middleton was attacked by three angry bees. They 
made him say Yes and No alternately so many times that 
he had to admit in men a shiftier yieldingness than women 
were charged with. 

Willoughby gesticulated as mute chorus on the side of the 
ladies: and a little show of party spirit like that, coming 
upon their excitement under the topic, inclined them to him 
genially. 

He drew Mr. Dale away while the conflict subsided in 
sharp snaps of rifles and an interval rejoinder of a cannon. 

Mr. Dale had shown by signs that he was growing fret¬ 
fully restive under his burden of doubt. 

“ Sir Willoughby, I have a question. I beg you to lead 
me where I may ask it. I know my head is weak.” 

“ Mr. Dale, it is answered when I say that my house is 
your home, and that Laetitia will soon be with us.” 

“ Then this report is true ! ” 

“ I know nothing of reports. You are answered.” 

“ Can my daughter be accused of any shadow of falseness, 
dishonourable dealing ? ” 


sir Willoughby’s generalship 


485 


“ As little as I.” 

Mr. Dale scanned his face. He saw no shadow. 

“ For I should go to my grave bankrupt if that could be 
said of her; and I have never yet felt poor, though you 
know the extent of a pensioner’s income. Then this tale of 
a refusal . . . ? ” 

“ Is nonsense.” 

“ She has accepted ? ” 

“ There are situations, Mr. Dale, too delicate to be clothed 
in positive definitions.” 

“ Ah, Sir Willoughby, but it becomes a father to see that 
his daughter is not forced into delicate situations. I hope 
all is well. I am confused. It may be my head. She 
puzzles me. You are not . . . Can I ask it here ? You 
are quite ? ... Will you moderate my anxiety ? My 
infirmities must excuse me.” 

Sir Willoughby conveyed by a shake of the head and a 
pressure of Mr. Dale’s hand, that he was not, and that he 
was quite. 

“ Dr. Middleton ? ” said Mr. Dale. 

“He leaves us to-morrow.” 

“ Really ! ” The invalid wore a look as if wine had been 
poured into him. He routed his host’s calculations by call¬ 
ing to the Rev. Doctor. “ We are to lose you, sir ? ” 

Willoughby attempted an interposition, but Dr. Middle- 
ton crashed through it like the lordly organ swallowing a 
flute. 

“Hot before I score my victory, Mr. Dale, and establish 
my friend upon his rightful throne.” 

“ You do not leave to-morrow, sir ? ” 

“ Have you heard, sir, that I leave to-morrow ? ” 

Mr. Dale turned to Sir Willoughby. 

The latter said: “Clara named to-day. To-morrow, 7 
thought preferable.” 

“Ah?” Dr. Middleton towered on the swelling exclama¬ 
tion, but with no dark light. He radiated splendidly. “ Yes, 
then, to-morrow. That is, if we subdue the lady.” 

He advanced to Willoughby, seized his hand, squeezed it, 
thanked him, praised him. He spoke under his breath, for 
a wonder; but: “We are in your debt lastingly, my friend,” 
was heard, and he was impressive, he seemed subdued, and 


486 


THE EGOIST 


saying aloud: “ Though I should wish to aid in the reduc¬ 
tion of that fortress/’ he let it be seen that his mind was rid 
of a load. 

Dr. Middleton partly stupefied Willoughby by his way of 
taking it, but his conduct was too serviceable to allow of 
speculation on his readiness to break the match. It was the 
turning-point of the engagement. 

Lady Busshe made a stir. 

“ I cannot keep my horses waiting any longer,” she said, 
and beckoned. Sir Willoughby was beside her immediately. 
“ You are admirable ! perfect! Don’t ask me to hold my 
tongue. I retract, I recant. It is a fatality. I have resolved 
upon that view. You could stand the shot of beauty, not of 
brains. That is our report. There! And it’s delicious to 
feel that the county wins you. No tea. I cannot possibly 
wait. And, oh ! here she is. I must have a look at her. 
My dear Lsetitia Dale ! ” 

Willoughby hurried to Mr. Dale. 

“You are not to be excited, sir: compose yourself. You 
will recover and be strong to-morrow: you are at home; 
you are in your own house; you are in Laetitia’s drawing¬ 
room. All will be clear to-morrow. Till to-morrow we talk 
riddles by consent. Sit, I beg. You stay with us.” 

He met Laetitia and rescued her from Lady Busshe, 
murmuring, with the air of a lover who says, “ my love! 
my sweet! ” that she had done rightly to come and come 
at once. 

Her father had been thrown into the proper condition 
of clammy nervousness to create the impression. Laetitia’s 
anxiety sat prettily on her long eyelashes as she bent over 
him in his chair. 

Hereupon Dr. Corney appeared; and his name had a 
bracing effect on Mr. Dale. “Corney has come to drive 
me to the cottage,” he said. “I am ashamed of this public 
exhibition of myself, my dear. Let us go. My head is a 
poor one.” 

Dr. Corney had been intercepted. He broke from Sir 
Willoughby with a dozen little nods of accurate under¬ 
standing of him, even to beyond the mark of the communi¬ 
cations. He touched his patient’s pulse lightly, briefly 
sighed with professional composure, and pronounced; “ Rest 


sir Willoughby’s generalship 


487 


Must not be moved. No, no, nothing serious,” he quieted 
Leetitia’s fears, “ but rest, rest. A change of residence for 
a night will tone him. I will bring him a draught in the 
course of the evening. Yes, yes, I'll fetch everything 
wanted from the cottage for you and for him. Repose on 
Corney’s forethought.” 

“ You are sure, Dr. Corney ?” said Laetitia, frightened on 
her father’s account and on her own. 

“ Which aspect will be the best for Mr. Dale’s bed-room ? n 
the hospitable ladies Eleanor and Isabel inquired. 

“ Southeast, decidedly: let him have the morning sun: 
a warm air, a vigorous air, and a bright air, and the patient 
wakes and sings in his bed.” 

Still doubtful whether she was in a trap, Laetitia 
whispered to her father of the privacy and comforts of his 
home. 

He replied to her that he thought he would rather be in 
his own home. 

Dr. Corney positively pronounced No to it. 

Laetitia breathed again of home, but with the sigh of one 
overborne. 

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel took the word from 
Willoughby, and said: “ But you are at home, my dear. 
This is your home. Your father will be at least as well 
attended here as at the cottage.” 

She raised her eyelids on them mournfully, and by chance 
diverted her look to Dr. Middleton, quite by chance. 

It spoke eloquently to the assembly of all that Willoughby 
desired to be imagined. 

“But there is Crossjay,” she cried. “My cousin has gone, 
and the boy is left alone. I cannot have him left alone. If 
we, if, Dr. Corney, you are sure it is unsafe for papa to be 
moved to-day, Crossjay must ... he cannot be left.” 

“ Bring him with you, Corney,” said Sir Willoughby : and 
the little doctor heartily promised that he would, in the 
event of his finding Crossjay at the cottage, which he 
thought a distant probability. 

“He gave me his word he would not go out till my 
return,” said Laetitia. 

“And if Crossjay gave you his word,” the accents of a 
new voice vibrated close by, “be certain that he will not 


488 


THE EGOIST 


come back with Dr. Corney unless be has authority in your 
handwriting.” 

Clara Middleton stepped gently to Laetitia, and with a 
manner that was an embrace, as much as kissed her for 
what she was doing on behalf of Crossjay. She put her 
Lips in a pouting form to simulate saying: “Press it.” 

“ He is to come,” said Laetitia. 

“ Then, write him his permit.” 

There was a chatter about Cross jay and the sentinel true 
to his post that he could be, during which Laetitia dis¬ 
tressfully scribbled a line for Dr. Corney to deliver to him. 
Clara stood near. She had rebuked herself for a want of 
reserve in the presence of Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer, 
and she was guilty of a slightly excessive containment when 
she next addressed Laetitia. It was, like Laetitia’s look at 
Dr. Middleton, opportune: enough to make a man who 
watched as Willoughby did, a fatalist for life: the shadow 
of a difference in her bearing toward Laetitia sufficed to 
impute acting, either to her present coolness or her previous 
warmth. Better still, when Dr. Middleton said: “ So we 
leave to-morrow, my dear, and I hope you have written to 
the Darletons,” Clara flushed and beamed, and repressed 
her animation on a sudden, with one grave look, that might 
be thought regretful, to where Willoughby stood. 

Chance works for us when we are good captains. 

Willoughby’s pride was high, though he knew himself to 
be keeping it up like a fearfully dexterous juggler, and for 
an empty reward : but he was in the toils of the world. 

“ Have you written ? The post-bag leaves in half an 
hour,” he addressed her. 

“We are expected, but I will write,” she replied: and her 
not having yet written counted in his favour. 

She went to write the letter. Dr. Corney had departed 
on his mission to fetch Crossjay and medicine. Lady Busshe 
was impatient to be gone. “Corney,” she said to Lady 
Culmer, “is a deadly gossip.” 

“Inveterate,” was the answer. 

“ My poor horses! ” 

“ Not the young pair of bays ? ” 

“Luckily, my dear. And don’t let me hear of dining 
to-night!” 


sir Willoughby’s generalship 


48? 


Sir Willoughby was leading out Mr. Dale to a quiet room, 
contiguous to the invalid gentleman’s bed-chamber. He 
resigned him to Laetitia in the hall, that he might have the 
pleasure of conducting the ladies to their carriage. 

“As little agitation as possible. Corney will soon be 
back,” he said, bitterly admiring the graceful subservience 
of Lsetitia’s figure to her father’s weight on her arm. 

He had won a desperate battle, but what had he won ? 
What had the world given him in return for his efforts to 
gain it? Just a shirt, it might be said: simple scanty 
clothing, no warmth. Lady Busshe was unbearable; she 
gabbled; she was ill-bred, permitted herself to speak of 
Dr. Middleton as ineligible, no loss to the county. And 
Mrs. Mountstuart was hardly much above her, with her in¬ 
evitable stroke of caricature : — “ You see Dr. Middleton’s 
pulpit scampering after him with legs ! ” Perhaps the Tfcev. 
Doctor did punish the world for his having forsaken his 
pulpit, and might be conceived as haunted by it at his heels, 
but Willoughby was in the mood to abhor comic images : he 
hated the perpetrators of them and the grinners. Contempt 
of this laughing empty world, for which he had performed 
a monstrous immolation, led him to associate Dr. Middleton 
in his mind, and Clara too, with the desireable things he had 
sacrificed — a shape of youth and health; a sparkling com¬ 
panion ; a face of innumerable charms; and his own veracity; 
his inner sense of his dignity; and his temper, and the 
limpid frankness of his air of scorn, that was to him a visage 
of candid happiness in the dim retrospect. Haply also he 
had sacrificed more ; he looked scientifically into the future : 
he might have sacrificed a nameless more. And for what ? 
he asked again. For the favourable looks and tongues of 
these women whose looks and tongues he detested! 

“ Dr. Middleton says he is indebted to me: I am deeply in 
his debt,” he remarked. 

“It is we who are in your debt for a lovely romance, my 
dear Sir Willoughby,” said Lady Busshe, incapable of taking 
a correction, so thoroughly had he imbued her with his fiction, 
or with the belief that she had a good story to circulate. 

Away she drove, rattling her tongue to Lady Culraer. 

“ A hat and horn, and she would be in the old figure of a 
post-boy on a hue-and-cry sheet,” said Mrs. Mountstuart. 


490 


THE EGOIST 


Willoughby thanked the great lady for her services, and 
she complimented the polished gentleman on his noble self- 
possession. But she complained at the same time of being 
defrauded of her “ charmer ” Colonel De Craye since lun¬ 
cheon. An absence of warmth in her compliment caused 
Willoughby to shrink and think the wretched shirt he had 
got from the world no covering after all: a breath flapped 
it. 

“ He comes to me, to-morrow, I believe,” she said, reflect¬ 
ing on her superior knowledge of facts in comparison with 
Lady Busshe, who would presently be hearing of something 
novel, and exclaiming: “ So, that is why you patronized the 
colonel! ” And it was nothing of the sort, for Mrs. Mount- 
stuart could honestly say she was not the woman to make a 
business of her pleasure. 

“ Horace is an enviable fellow,” said Willoughby, wise in 
The Book, which bids us ever, for an assuagement, to fancy 
our friend’s condition worse than our own, and recommends 
the deglutition of irony as the most balsamic for wounds in 
the whole moral pharmacopoeia. 

“ I don’t know,” she replied with a marked accent of delib¬ 
eration. 

“ The colonel is to have you to himself to-morrow! ” 

“ I can’t be sure of what I shall have in the colonel! ” 

“ Your perpetual sparkler ? ” 

Mrs. Mountstuart set her head in motion. She left the 
matter silent. 

“ I ’ll come for him in the morning,” she said, and her 
carriage whirled her off. 

Either she had guessed it, or Clara had confided to her the 
treacherous passion of Horace De Craye ! 

However, the world was shut away from Patterne for the 
night. 


SIB WILLOUGHBY AND HIS FRIEND 


491 


CHAPTER XLVII 

SIR WILLOUGHBY AND HIS FRIEND HORACE DE CRATE 

Willoughby shut himself up in his laboratory to brood 
awhile after the conflict. Sounding through himself, as it 
was habitual with him to do, for the plan most agreeable to 
his taste, he came on a strange discovery among the lower 
circles of that microcosm. He was no longer guided in his 
choice by liking and appetite : he had to put it on the edge 
of a sharp discrimination and try it by his acutest judgment 
before it was acceptable to his heart: and knowing well the 
direction of his desire, he was nevertheless unable to run 
two strides on a wish. He had learnt to read the world : his 
partial capacity for reading persons had fled. The mysteries 
of his own bosom were bare to him ; but he could compre¬ 
hend them only in their immediate relation to the world 
outside. This hateful world had caught him and transformed 
him to a machine. The discovery he made was, that in the 
gratification of the egoistic instinct we may so beset our¬ 
selves as to deal a slaughtering wound upon Self to whatso¬ 
ever quarter we turn. 

Surely there is nothing stranger in mortal experience. 
The man was confounded. At the game of Chess it is the 
dishonour of our adversary when we are stale-mated : but in 
life, combatting the world, such a winning of the game ques¬ 
tions our sentiments. 

Willoughby’s interpretation of his discovery was directed 
by pity: he had no other strong emotion left in him. He 
pitied himself, and he reached the conclusion that he suffered 
because he was active ; he could not be quiescent. Had it 
not been for his devotion to his house and name, never would 
he have stood twice the victim of womankind. Had he been 
selfish, he would have been the happiest of men ! He said it 
aloud. He schemed benevolently for his unborn young, and 
for the persons about him: hence he was in a position for¬ 
bidding a step under pain of injury to his feelings. He was 
generous : otherwise would he not in scorn of soul, at the 
outset, straight off, have pitched Clara Middleton to the 


492 


THE EGOIST 


wanton winds ? He was faithful in affection : Laetitia Dale 
was beneath his roof to prove it. Both these women were 
examples of his power of forgiveness, and now a tender word 
to Clara might fasten shame on him — such was her grati¬ 
tude ! And if he did not marry Laetitia, laughter would be 
devilish all around him — such was the world’s ! Probably 
Vernon would not long be thankful for the chance which 
varied the monotony of his days. What of Horace ? Wil¬ 
loughby stripped to enter the ring with Horace: he cast 
away disguise. That man had been the first to divide him 
in the all but equal slices of his egoistic from his amatory 
self: murder of his individuality was the crime of Horace 
De Craye. And further, suspicion fixed on Horace (he knew 
not how, except that The Book bids us be suspicious of those 
we hate) as the man who had betrayed his recent dealings 
with Laetitia. 

Willoughby walked the thoroughfares of the house to 
meet Clara and make certain of her either for himself or, if 
it must be, for Vernon, before he took another step w'ith 
Laetitia Dale. Clara could reunite him, turn him once more 
into a whole and an animated man ; and she might be will¬ 
ing. Her willingness to listen to Vernon promised it. “ A 
gentleman with a tongue would have a chance,” Mrs. Mount- 
stuart had said. How much greater the chance of a lover ! 
For he had not yet supplicated her : he had shown pride and 
temper. He could woo, he was a torrential wooer. And it 
would be glorious to swing round on Lady Busshe and the 
world, with Clara nestling under an arm, and protest aston¬ 
ishment at the erroneous and utterly unfounded anticipa¬ 
tions of any other development. And it would righteously 
punish Laetitia. 

Clara came downstairs, bearing her letter to Miss Dar- 
leton. 

“ Must it be posted ? ” Willoughby said, meeting her in 
the hall. 

“ They expect us any day, but it will be more comfortable 
for papa,” was her answer. She looked kindly in her new 
shyness. 

She did not seem to think he had treated her contempt- 
uously in flinging her to his cousin, which was odd. 

“You have seen Vernon ? ” 


SIR WILLOUGHBY AND HIS FRIEND 


493 


“It was your wish.” 

“ You had a talk ? ” 

“We conversed.” 

“ A long one ? ” 

“We walked some distance." 

“ Clara, I tried to make the best arrangement I could.* 

“ Your intention was generous” 

“ He took no advantage of it ? ” 

“ It could not be treated seriously.” 

“ It was meant seriously.” 

“There I see the generosity.” 

Willoughby thought this encomium, ana her consent to 
speak on the subject, and her scarcely embarrassed air and 
richness of tone in speaking, very strange: and strange was 
her taking him quite in earnest. Apparently she had no 
feminine sensation of the unwoutedness and the absurdity 
of the matter! 

“But, Clara! am I to understand that he did not speak 
out ? ” 

“ We are excellent friends.” 

“To miss it, though his chance were the smallest!” 

“ You forget that it may not wear that appearance to him.” 
“ He spoke not one word of himself ? ” 

“No.” 

“ Ah ! the poor old fellow was taught to see it was hope¬ 
less — chilled. May I plead ? Will you step into the labora¬ 
tory for a minute ? We are two sensible persons . . .” 
“Pardon me, I must go to papa.” 

“Vernon’s personal history perhaps . . • ? ” 

“ I think it honourable to nim.” 

“ Honourable ! — ’hem ! ” 

“ By comparison.” 

“ Comparison with what ? ” 

“With others.” 

He drew up to relieve himself of a critical and condem¬ 
natory expiration of a certain length. This young lady 
knew too much. But how physically exquisite she was ! 

“ Could you, Clara, could you promise me — I hold to it. 
I must have it, I know his shy tricks — promise me to 
give him ultimately another chance ? Is the idea repul¬ 
sive to you ? ” 


494 


THE EGOIST 


" It is one not to be thought of.” 

H It is not repulsive ? ” 

"Nothing could be repulsive in Mr. Whitford.” 

" I have no wish to annoy you, Clara.” 

" I feel bound to listen to you, Willoughby. Whatever I 
can do to please you, I will. It is my life-long duty.” 

"Could you, Clara, could you conceive it, could you 
simply conceive it; — give him your hand ? ” 

" As a friend, Oh! yes.” 

" In marriage.” 

She paused. She, so penetrative of him when he op¬ 
posed her, was hoodwinked when he softened her feelings: 
for the heart, — though the clearest, is not the most con¬ 
stant instructor of the head ; the heart, unlike the often 
obtuser head, works for itself and not for the common¬ 
wealth. 

"You are so kind ... I would do much ...” she 
said. 

" Would you accept him — marry him ? He is poor.” 

" I am not ambitious of wealth.” 

" Would you marry him ? ” 

" Marriage is not in my thoughts.” 

" But could you marry him ? ” 

Willoughby expected no. In his expectation of it he 
hung inflated. 

She said these words : “ I could engage to marry no one 
else.” 

His amazement breathed without a syllable. 

He flapped his arms, resembling for the moment those 
birds of enormous body which attempt a rise upon their 
wings and achieve a hop. 

" Would you engage it ? ” he said, content to see himself 
stepped on as an insect if he could but feel the agony of 
his false friend Horace — their common pretensions to win 
her were now of that comparative size. 

"Oh! there can be no necessity. And an oath — no!” 
said Clara, inwardly shivering at a recollection. 

" But you could ? ” 

"My wish is to please you.” 

" You could ? ” 

" I said so.” 


SIR WILLOUGHBY AND HIS FRIEND 


495 


It has been known of the patriotic mountaineer of a 
hoary pile of winters, with little life remaining in him, but 
that little on fire for his country, that by the brink of the 
precipice he has hung himself on a young and lusty invader, 
dedicating himself exultingly to death if only he may score 
a point for his country by extinguishing in his country’s 
enemy the stronger man. So likewise did Willoughby, in 
the blow that deprived him of hope, exult in the toppling 
over of Horace De Craye. They perished together, but 
which one sublimely relished the headlong descent? And 
Vernon taken by Clara would be Vernon simply tolerated. 
And Clara taken by Vernon would be Clara previously 
touched, smirched. Altogether he could enjoy his fall. 

It was at least upon a comfortable bed, where his pride 
would be dressed daily and would never be disagreeably 
treated. 

He was henceforth Laetitia’s own. The bell telling of 
Hr. Corney’s return was a welcome sound to Willoughby, 
and he said good-humouredly : “ Wait, Clara, you will see 

your hero Cross jay.” 

Crossjay and Dr. Corney tumbled into the hall. Wil¬ 
loughby caught Crossjay under the arms to give him a lift 
in the old fashion pleasing to Clara to see. The boy was 
heavy as lead. 

“ I had work to hook him and worse to net him,” said 
Dr. Corney. “I had to make him believe he was to nurse 
every soul in the house, you among them, Miss Middleton.” 

Willoughby pulled the boy aside. 

Cross jay came back to Clara heavier in looks than his 
limbs had been. She dropped her letter in the hall-box, and 
took his hand to have a private hug of him. When they 
were alone, she said: “ Crossjay, my dear, my dear ! You 
look unhappy.” 

“Yes, and who wouldn’t be, and you ’re not to marry Sir 
Willoughby ! ” his voice threatened a cry. “ I know you ’re 
not, for Dr. Corney ^ays you are going to leave.” 

“ Did you so very much wish it, Crossjay ? ” 

“ I should have seen a lot of you, and I sha’ n’t see you at 
all, and I’m sure if I’d known I wouldn’t have —and he 
has been and tipped me this.” 

Crossjay opened his fist in which lay three gold pieces. 


496 


THE EGOIST 


“ That was very kind of him,” said Clara. 

“ Yes, but how can I keep it ? ” 

“By handing it to Mr. Whitford to keep for you.” 

“Yes, but, Miss Middleton, oughtn’t I to tell him? I 
mean Sir Willoughby.” 

“ What ? ” 

“ Why, that I,” Cross jay got close to her, “ why, that I, 
that I — you know what you used to say. I would n’t tell 
a lie, but ought n’t I, without his asking . . . and this 
money! I don’t mind being turned out again.” 

“ Consult Mr. Whitford,” said Clara. 

“I know what you think, though.” 

“Perhaps you had better not say anything at present, 
dear boy.” 

“ But what am I to do with this money ? ” 

Cross jay held the gold pieces out as things that had not 
yet mingled with his ideas of possession. 

“I listened, and I told of him,” he said. “I couldn’t 
help listening, but I went and told; and I don’t like being 
here, and his money, and he not knowing what I did. 
Haven’t you heard ? I’m certain I know what you think, 
and so do I, and I must take my luck, I’m always in mis¬ 
chief, getting into a mess or getting out of it. I don’t 
mind, I really don’t, Miss Middleton, I can sleep in a tree 
quite comfortably. If you ’re not going to be here, I’d just as 
soon be anywhere. I must try to earn my living some day. 
And why not a cabin-boy ? Sir Cloudesley Shovel was no 
better. And I don’t mind his being wrecked at last, if 
you ’re drowned an admiral. So I shall go and ask him to 
take his money back, and if he asks me I shall tell him, 
and there. You know what it is: I guessed that from 
what Dr. Corney said. I’m sure I know you ’re thinking 
what’s manly. Fancy me keeping his money, and you not 
marrying him! I wouldn’t mind driving a plough. I 
should n’t make a bad gamekeeper. Of course I love boats 
best, but you can’t have everything.” 

“ Speak to Mr. Whitford first,” said Clara, too proud of the 
boy for growing as she had trained him, to advise a course 
of conduct opposed to his notions of manliness, though now 
that her battle was over she would gladly have acquiesced in 
little casuistic comnromises for the sake of the general peace. 


SIR WILLOUGHBY AND HIS FRIEND 


49T 


Some time later Vernon and Dr. Corney were arguing 
upon the question. Corney was dead against the sentimental 
view of the morality of the case propounded by Vernon as 
coming from Miss Middleton and partly shared by him. “ If 
it’s on the boy's mind,” Vernon said, “I can’t prohibit his 
going to Willoughby and making a clean breast of it, espe¬ 
cially as it involves me, and sooner or later I should have to 
tell him myself.” 

Dr. Corney said no at all points. “ Now hear me,” he said 
finally. “ This is between ourselves, and no breach of confi¬ 
dence, which I’d not be guilty of for forty friends, though 
I’d give my hand from the wrist-joint for one — my left, 
that’s to say. Sir Willoughby puts me one or two search¬ 
ing interrogations on a point of interest to him, his house 
and name. Very well, and good night to that, and I wish 
Miss Dale had been ten years younger, or had passed the 
ten with no heartrisings and sinkings wearing to the tissues 
of the frame and the moral fibre to boot. She ’ll have a 
fairish health, with a little occasional doctoring; taking her 
rank and wealth in right earnest, and shying her pen back 
to Mother Goose. She ’ll do. And, by the way, I think it’s 
to the credit of my sagacity that I fetched Mr. Dale here 
fully primed, and roused the neighbourhood, which I did, 
and so fixed our gentleman, neat as a prodded eel on a pair 
of prongs — namely, the positive fact and the general know¬ 
ledge of it. But mark me, my friend. We understand one 
another at a nod. This boy, young Squire Crossjay, is a good 
stiff hearty kind of a Saxon boy, out of whom you may cut 
as gallant a fellow as ever wore epaulettes. I like him, you 
like him, Miss Dale and Miss Middleton like him; and Sir 
Willoughby Patterne of Patterne Hall and other places won’t 
be indisposed to like him mightily in the event of the sun 
being seen to shine upon him with a particular determination 
to make him appear a prominent object, because a solitary, 
and a Patterne.” Dr. Corney lifted his chest and his finger : 
" Now, mark me, and verbum sap: Crossjay must not offend 
Sir Willoughby. I say no more. Look ahead. Miracles 
happen, but it’s best to reckon that they won’t. Well, 
now, and Miss Dale. She’ll not be cruel.” 

“ It appears as if she would,” said Vernon, meditating on 
the cloudy sketch Dr. Corney had drawn. 


498 


THE EGOIST 


“ She can’t, my friend. Her position ’s precarious ; her 
father has little besides a pension. And her writing damages 
her health. She can’t. And she likes the baronet. Oh, it’s 
only a little fit of proud blood. She’s the woman for him. 
She ’ll manage him — give him an idea that he has got a lot 
of ideas. It’d kill her father if she was obstinate. He talked 
to me, when I told him of the business, about his dream ful¬ 
filled, and if the dream turns to vapour, he ’ll be another 
example that we hang more upon dreams than realities for 
nourishment, and medicine too. Last week I could n’t have 
got him out of his house with all my art and science. Oh, 
she ’ll come round. Her father prophesied this, and I ’ll pro¬ 
phesy that. She’s fond of him.” 

“ She was.” 

“ She sees through him ? ” 

“ Without quite doing justice to him now,” said Vernon. 
“ He can be generous — in his way.” 

“ How ? ” Corney inquired, and was informed that he 
should hear in time to come. 

Meanwhile Colonel He Craye, after hovering over the park 
and about the cottage for the opportunity of pouncing on 
Miss Middleton alone, had returned, crest-fallen, for once, 
and plumped into Willoughby’s hands. 

“My dear Horace,” Willoughby said, “I’ve been looking 
for you all the afternoon. The fact is — I fancy you ’ll think 
yourself lured down here on false pretences : but the truth 
is, I am not so much to blame as the world will suppose. In 
point of fact, to be brief, Miss Hale and I ... I never 
consult other men how they would have acted. The fact of 
the matter is, Miss Middleton ... I fancy you have partly 
guessed it.” 

“ Partly,” said He Craye. 

“ Well, she has a liking that way, and if it should turn 
out strong enough, it’s the best arrangement I can think of.” 

The lively play of the colonel’s features fixed in a blank 
inquiry. 

“ One can back a good friend for making a good husband,” 
said Willoughby. “ I could not break with her in the present 
stage of affairs without seeing to that. And I can speak of 
her highly, though she and I have seen in time that we do 
not suit one another. My wife must have brains.” 


SIR WILLOUGHBY AND HIS FRIEND 499 

“ I have always thought it,” said Colonel De Craye, glisten¬ 
ing and looking hungry as a wolf through his wonderment. 

“ There will not be a word against her, you understand. 
You know my dislike of tattle and gossip. However, let it 
fall on me; my shoulders are broad. I have done my 
utmost to persuade her, and there seems a likelihood of her 
consenting. She tells me her wish is to please me, and this 
will please me.” 

“ Certainly. Who’s the gentleman ? ” 

“ My best friend, I tell you. I could hardly have pro¬ 
posed another. Allow this business to go on smoothly just 
now.” 

There was an uproar within the colonel to blind his wits, 
and Willoughby looked so friendly that it was possible to 
suppose the man of projects had mentioned his best friend 
to Miss Middleton. 

And who was the best friend ? 

Not having accused himself of treachery, the quick-eyed 
colonel was duped. 

“ Have you his name handy, Willoughby ? ” 

“ That would be unfair to him at present, Horace — ask 
yourself — and to her. Things are in a ticklish posture at 
present. Don’t be hasty.” 

“ Certainly. I don’t ask. Initials ’ll do.” 

“You have a remarkable aptitude for guessing, Horace, 
and this case offers you no tough problem — if ever you 
acknowledge toughness. I have a regard for her and for 
him — for both pretty equally; you know I have, and I 
should be thoroughly thankful to bring the matter about.” 

“ Lordly ! ” said De Craye. 

“ I don’t see it. I call it sensible.” 

“ Oh! undoubtedly. The style, I mean. Tolerably 
antique ? ” 

“Novel, I should say and not the worse for that. We 
want plain practical dealings between men and women. 
Usually we go the wrong way to work. And I loath senti¬ 
mental rubbish.” 

De Craye hummed an air. “ But the lady ? ” said he. 

“ I told you, there seems a likelihood of her consenting.” 

Willoughby’s fish gave a perceptible little leap now that 
he had been taught to exercise his aptitude for guessing. 


500 


THE EGOIST 


" Without any of the customary preliminaries on the side 
of the gentleman ? ” he said. 

" We must put him through his paces, friend Horace. 
He’s a notorious blunderer with women ; has n’t a word for 
them, never marked a conquest.” 

De Craye crested his plumes under the agreeable banter. 
He presented a face humourously sceptical. 

" The lady is positively not indisposed to give the poor 
fellow a hearing ? ” 

“ I have cause to think she is not,” said Willoughby, glad 
of acting the indifference to her which could talk of her 
inclinations. 

" Cause ? ” 

" Good cause.” 

" Bless us ! ” 

" As good as one can have with a woman.” 

“ Ah?” 

“I assure you.” 

" Ah ! Does it seem like her, though ? ” 

" Well, she would n’t engage herself to accept him.” 

"Well, that seems more like her.” 

"But she said she could engage to marry no one else.” 

The colonel sprang up, crying: "Clara Middleton said 
it?” He curbed himself. "That’s a bit of wonderful 
compliancy.” 

" She wishes to please me. We separate on those terms. 
And I wish her happiness. I’ve developed a heart lately 
and taken to think of others.” 

"Nothing better. You appear to make cock sure of the 
other party — our friend ? ” 

" You know him too well, Horace, to doubt his readiness.” 

" Do iyoUy Willoughby ? ” 

" She has money and good looks. Yes, I can say I do.” 

" It would n’t be much of a man who’d want hard pulling 
to that lighted altar ! ” 

" And if he requires persuasion, you and I, Horace, might 
bring him to his senses.” 

" Kicking, ’t would be! ” 

"I like to see everybody happy about me,” said Wil¬ 
loughby, naming the hour as time to dress for dinner. 

The sentiment he had delivered was De Craye’s excuse for 


THE LO VERS 


501 


grasping nis hand and complimenting him; but the colonel 
betrayed himself by doing it with an extreme fervour almost 
tremulous. 

“When shall we hear more?” he said. 

“Oh, probably to-morrow,” said Willoughby. “Don’t be 
in such a hurry.” 

“ I’m an infant asleep! ” the colonel replied, departing. 

He resembled one, to Willoughby’s mind: or a traitor 
drugged. 

“ There is a fellow I thought had some brains! ” 

Who are not fools to be set spinning if we choose to whip 
them with their vanity! It is the consolation of the great 
to watch them spin. But the pleasure is loftier, and may 
comfort our unmerited misfortune for a while, in making a 
false friend drunk. 

Willoughby, among his many preoccupations, had the 
satisfaction of seeing the effect of drunkenness on Horace 
De Craye when the latter was in Clara’s presence. He 
could have laughed. Cut in keen epigram were the mar¬ 
ginal notes added by him to that chapter of The Book 
which treats of friends and a woman: and had he not 
been profoundly preoccupied, troubled by recent intelli¬ 
gence communicated by the ladies, his aunts, he would 
have played the two together for the royal amusement 
afforded him by his friend Horace. 


CHAPTER XLVIII 

THE LOVERS 

The hour was close upon eleven at night. Lsetitia sat in 
the room adjoining her father’s bed-chamber. Her elbow 
was on the table beside her chair, and two fingers pressed 
her temples. The state between thinking and feeling, when 
both are molten and flow by us, is one of our nature’s inter¬ 
missions, coming after thought has quieted the fiery nerves, 
and can do no more. She seemed to be meditating. She 
was conscious only of a struggle past. 



502 


THE EGOIST 


She answered a tap at the door, and raised her eyes on 
Clara. 

Clara stepped softly. “ Mr. Dale is asleep ? ” 

“ I hope so.” 

“ Ah! dear friend.” 

Laetitia let her hand be pressed. 

“ Have you had a pleasant evening ?” 

“ Mr. Whitford and papa have gone to the library.” 

“ Colonel De Craye has been singing ? ” 

“Yes — with a voice! I thought of you upstairs, but 
could not ask him to sing piano.” 

“ He is probably exhilarated.” 

“ One would suppose it: he sang well.” 

“You are not aware of any reason?” 

“It cannot concern me.” 

Clara was in rosy colour, but could meet a steady gaze. 

“And Crossjay has gone to bed ?” 

“ Long since. He was at dessert. He would not touch 
anything.” 

“ He is a strange boy.” 

“Not very strange, Laetitia.” 

“ He did not come to me to wish me good night.” 

“ That is not strange.” 

“ It is his habit at the cottage and here; and he professes 
to like me.” 

“Oh! he does. I may have wakened his enthusiasm, 
but you he loves.” 

“ Why do you say it is not strange, Clara ? ” 

“ He fears you a little.” 

“And why should Crossjay fear me ?” 

“Dear, I will tell you. Last night — You will forgive 
him, for it was by accident: his own bed-room door was 
locked and he ran down to the drawing-room and curled 
himself up on the ottoman, and fell asleep, under that 
padded silken coverlet of the ladies — boots and all, I am 
afraid! ” 

Laetitia profited by this absurd allusion, thanking Clara 
in her heart for the refuge. 

“ He should have taken off his boots,” she said. 

“ He slept there, and woke up. Dear, he meant no harm. 
Next day he repeated what he had heard. You will blame 


THE LOVERS 


503 


him. He meant well in his poor boy’s head. And now it 
is over the county. Ah! do not frown.” 

“ That explains Lady Busshe ! ” exclaimed Laetitia. 

“ Dear, dear friend,” said Clara. “ Why — I presume on 
your tenderness for me; but let me : to-morrow I go — why 
will you reject your happiness ? Those kind good ladies 
are deeply troubled. They say your resolution is inflexible; 
you resist their entreaties and your father’s. Can it be 
that you have any doubt of the strength of this attachment ? 
I have none. I have never had a doubt that it was the 
strongest of his feelings. If before I go I could see you . . . 
both happy, I should be relieved, I should rejoice.” 

Laetitia said quietly: “ Do you remember a walk we had 
one day together to the cottage ? ” 

Clara put up her hands with the motion of intending to 
stop her ears. 

“Before I go! ” said she. “ If I might know this was to 
be, which all desire, before I leave, I should not feel as I do 
now. I long to see you happy . . . him, yes, him too. Is 
it like asking you to pay my debt ? Then, please! But, 
no; I am not more than partly selfish on this occasion. He 
has won my gratitude. He can be really generous.” 

“ An Egoist ? ” 

“Who is?” 

“You have forgotten our conversation,on the day of our 
walk to the cottage ? ” 

“ Help me to forget it — that day, and those days, and all 
those days! I should be glad to think I passed a time 
beneath the earth, and have risen again. I was the Egoist. 
I am sure, if I had been buried, I should not have stood up 
seeing myself more vilely stained, soiled, disfigured — oh! 
Help me to forget my conduct, Laetitia. He and I were 
unsuited — and I remember I blamed myself then. You 
and he are not: and now I can perceive the pride that can be 
felt in him. The worst that can be said is, that he schemes 
too much.” 

“ Is there any fresh scheme ? ” said Laetitia. 

The rose came over Clara’s face. 

“ You have not heard ? It was impossible, but it was 
kindly intended. Judging by my own feeling at this mo¬ 
ment, I can understand his. We love to see our friends 
established.” 


504 


THE EGOIST 


Laetitia bowed. “My curiosity is piqued, of course.” 

“ Dear friend, to-morrow we shall be parted. I trust to 
be thought of by you as a little better in grain than I have 
appeared, and my reason for trusting it is, that I know I 
have been always honest — a boorish young woman in my 
stupid mad impatience; but not insincere. It is no lofty 
ambition to desire to be remembered in that character, but 
such is your Clara, she discovers. I will tell you. It is 
his wish . . . his wish that I should promise to give my 
hand to Mr. Whitford. You see the kindness.” 

Laetitia’s eyes widened and fixed, — 

“ You think it kindness ? ” 

“The intention. He sent Mr. Whitford to me, and I 
was taught to expect him.” 

“ Was that quite kind to Mr. Whitford ? ” 

“ What an impression I must have made on you during 
that walk to the cottage, Lsetitia ! I do not wonder; I was 
in a fever.” 

“ You consented to listen ? ” 

“I really did. It astonishes me now, but I thought I 
could not refuse.” 

“ My poor friend Vernon WTiitford tried a love speech.” 

“He ? no: Oh! no.” 

“ You discouraged him ? ” 

“I? no.” 

“Gently, I mean.” 

“No.” 

“ Surely you did not dream of trifling ? He has a deep 
heart.” 

“ Has he ? ” 

“ You ask that: and you know something of him.” 

“ He did not expose it to me, dear; not even the surface 
of the mighty deep.” 

Laetitia knitted her brows. 

“No,” said Clara, “not a coquette: she is not a coquette, 
[ assure you.” 

With a laugh, Laetitia replied: “ You have still the 
‘dreadful power’ you made me feel that day.” 

“ I wish I could use it to good purpose ! ” 

“ He did not speak ? ” 

“Of Switzerland, Tyrol, the Iliad, Antigone.” 


THE LOVERS 


50 6 


“ That was all ? ” 

“No, Political Economy. Our situation, you will own, 
was unexampled °. or mine was. Are you interested in 
me ? ” 

“ I should be, if I knew your sentiments.” 

“ I was grateful to Sir Willoughby: grieved for Mr. 
Whitford.” 

“ Real grief ? ” 

“ Because the task imposed on him of showing me politely 
that he did not enter into his cousin’s ideas, was evidently 
very great, extremely burdensome.” 

“ You, so quick-eyed in some things, Clara! ” 

“ He felt for me. I saw that, in his avoidance of . . . 
And he was, as he always is, pleasant. We rambled over 
the park for I know not how long, though it did not seem 
long.” 

“ Never touching that subject ? ” 

“Not ever neighbouring it, dear. A gentleman should 
esteem the girl he would ask . . . certain questions. I 
fancy he has a liking for me as a volatile friend.” 

“ If he had offered himself ? ” 

“ Despising me ? ” 

“ You can be childish, Clara. Probably you delight to 
tease. He had his time of it, and it is now my turn.” 

“ But he must despise me a little.” 

“ Are you blind ? ” 

“ Perhaps, dear, we both are, a little.” 

The ladies looked deeper into one another. 

“Will you answer me?” said Lsetitia. 

“Your if? If he had, it would have been an act of con¬ 
descension.” 

“You are too slippery.” 

“ Stay, dear Laetitia. He was considerate in forbearing 
to pain me.” 

“ That is an answer. You allowed him to perceive that it 
would have pained you.” 

“ Dearest, if I may convey to you what I was, in a simile 
for comparison : I think I was like a fisherman’s float on 
the water, perfectly still, and ready to go down at any in¬ 
stant, or up. So much for my behaviour.” 

“ Similes have the merit of satisfying the finder of them, 


506 


THE EGOIST 


and cheating the hearer ,’ 7 said Lsetitia. “ You admit that 
your feelings would have been painful.” 

“ I was a fisherman’s float: please, admire my simile : 
any way you like, this way or that, or so quiet as to tempt 
the eyes to go to sleep. And suddenly I might have dis¬ 
appeared in the depths, or flown in the air. But no fish 
bit.” 

“Well, then, to follow you, supposing the fish or the 
fisherman, for I don’t know which is which ... Oh ! no, 
no: this is too serious for imagery. I am to understand 
that you thanked him at least for his reserve.” 

“ Yes.” 

“ Without the slightest encouragement to him to break 
it?” 

“A fisherman’s float, Laetitia!” 

Baffled and sighing, Lsetitia kept silence for a space. 

The simile chafed her wits with a suspicion of a meaning 
hidden in it. 

“ If he had spoken ? ” she said. 

“He is too truthful a man.” 

“And the railings of men at pussy women who wind 
about and will not be brought to a mark, become intelligible 
to me.” 

“ Then, Lsetitia, if he had spoken, if, and one could have 
imagined him sincere ...” 

“ So truthful a man ? ” 

“ I am looking at myself. If ! — why, then, I should 
have burnt to death with shame. Where have I read ? — 
some story — of an inextinguishable spark. That would 
have been shot into my heart.” 

“ Shame, Clara? You are free.” 

“ As much as remains of me.” 

“I could imagine a certain shame, in such a position, 
where there was no feeling but pride.” 

“ I could not imagine it where there was no feeling but 
pride.” 

Laetitia mused : “ And you dwell on the kindness of a 
proposition so extraordinary ! ” Gaining some light, iim 
patiently she cried ; “ Vernon loves you.” 

“ Do not say it! ” 

“ I have seen it.” 


THE LOVERS 


507 


W I have never had a sign of it." 

“ There is the proof." 

“ When it might have been shown again and again!” 

“ The greater proof !" 

“Why did he not speak when he was privileged? — 
strangely, but privileged." 

“ He feared." 

“ Me ? " 

“ Feared to wound you — and himself as well, possibly. 
Men may be pardoned for thinking of themselves in these 
cases.” 

“ But why should he fear ? ” 

“ That another was dearer to you ? " 

“ What cause had I given . . . Ah ! see ! He could fear 
that; suspect it! See his opinion of me! Can he care for 
such a girl ? Abuse me, Lsetitia. I should like a good 
round of abuse. I need purification by fire. What have I 
been in this house ? I have a sense of whirling through it 
like a madwoman. And to be loved, after it all! — No! 
we must be hearing a tale of an antiquary prizing a bat¬ 
tered relic of the battle-field that no one else would look at. 
To be loved, I see, is to feel our littleness, hollowness — 
feel shame. We come out in all our spots. Never to 
have given me one sign, when a lover would have been 
so tempted! Let me be incredulous, my own dear Laetitia. 
Because he is a man of honour, you would say! But are 
you unconscious of the torture you inflict ? For if I am — 
you say it — loved by this gentleman, what an object it is 
he loves—that has gone clamouring about more immodestly 
than women will bear to hear of, and she herself to think 
of! Oh! I have seen my own heart. It is a frightful 
spectre. I have seen a weakness in me that would have 
carried me anywhere. And truly I shall be charitable to 
women — I have gained that. But, loved! by Vernon Whit- 
ford ! The miserable little me to be taken up and loved 
after tearing myself to pieces ! Have you been simply 
speculating ? You have no positive knowledge of it! Why 
do you kiss me ? " 

“ Why do you tremble and blush so ? " 

Clara looked at her as clearly as she could. She bowed 
her head. “ It makes my conduct worse !" 


508 


THE EGOIST 


She received a tenderer kiss for that. It was her avowal, 
and it was understood: to know that she had loved, or had 
been ready to love him, shadowed her in the retrospect. 

“ Ah! you read me through and through,” said Clara, 
sliding to her for a whole embrace. 

“ Then there never was cause for him to fear ? ” Lsetitia 
whispered. 

Clara slid her head more out of sight. “Not that my 
heart . . . But I said I have seen it; and it is unworthy of 
him. And if, as I think now, I could have been so rash, so 
weak, wicked, unpardonable — such thoughts were in me! 
— then to hear him speak, would make it necessary for 
me to uncover myself and tell him — incredible to you, 
yes! — that while . . . yes, Lsetitia, all this is true: and 
thinking of him as the noblest of men, I could have 
welcomed any help to cut my knot. So there,” said Clara, 
issuing from her nest with winking eyelids, “ you see the 
pain I mentioned.” 

“Why did you not explain it to me at once ? ” 

“Dearest, I wanted a century to pass.” 

“ And you feel that it has passed ? ” 

“ Yes ; in Purgatory — with an angel by me. My report 
of the place will be favourable. Good angel, I have yet to 
say something.” 

“ Say it, and expiate.” 

“ I think I did fancy once or twice, very dimly, and espe¬ 
cially to-day . . . properly I ought not to have had any 
idea: but his coming to me, and his not doing as another 
would have done, seemed ... A gentleman of real noble¬ 
ness does not carry the common light for us to read him by. 
I wanted his voice; but silence, I think, did tell me more: 
if a nature like mine could only have had faith without 
hearing the rattle of a tongue.” 

A knock at the door caused the ladies to exchange looks. 

Laetitia rose as Vernon entered. 

“ I am just going to my father for a few minutes,” she 
said. 

“And I have just come from yours,” Vernon said to 
Clara. 

She observed a very threatening expression in him. 

The sprite of contrariety mounted to her brain to indem- 


THE LOVERS 


509 


nify her for her recent self-abasement. Seeing the bed-room 
door shut on Laetitia, she said: “ And of course papa has 
gone to bed/’ implying “ otherwise . . . ” 

“Yes, he has gone. He wished me well.” 
u His formula of good night would embrace that wish.” 

“ And failing, it will be good night for good to me ! ” 
Clara’s breathing gave a little leap. “We leave early 
to-morrow.” 

“I know. I have an appointment at Bregenz for June.” 
“ So soon ? With papa ? ” 

“ And from there we break into Tyrol, and round away to 
the right, Southward.” 

“ To the Italian Alps ! And was it assumed that I should 
be of this expedition ? ” 

“ Your father speaks dubiously.” 

“ You have spoken of me, then ? ” 

“ I ventured to speak of you. I am not over-bold, as you 
know.” 

Her lovely eyes troubled the lids to hide their softness. 
“Papa should not think of my presence with him 
dubiously.” 

“He leaves it to you to decide.” 

“Yes, then: many times : all that can be uttered.” 

“ Do you consider what you are saying ? ” 

“Mr. Whitford, I shut my eyes and say Yes.” 

“Beware. I give you one warning. If you shut your 
eyes ...” 

“Of course,” she flew from him, “big mountains must be 
satisfied with my admiration at their feet.” 

“That will do for a beginning.” 

“ They speak encouragingly.” 

“ One of them.” Vernon’s breast heaved high. 

“ To be at your feet makes a mountain of you ? ” said she. 
“With the heart of a mouse if that satisfies me ! ” 

“ You tower too high ; you are inaccessible.” 

“I give you a second warning. You may be seized and 
lifted.” 

“ Some one would stoop, then.” 

“ To plant you like the flag on the conquered peak ! ” 

“ You have indeed been talking to papa, Mr. Whitford.” 
Vernon changed his tone, 


510 


THE EGOIST 


“ Shall 1 tell you what he said ? 99 

“ I know his language so well.” 

“He said — 99 

“But you have acted on it.” 

“ Only partly. He said — 99 

“ You will teach me nothing.” 

“ He said ...” 

“ Vernon, no ! oh ! not in this house ! 99 

That supplication coupled with his name confessed the 
end to which her quick vision perceived she was being led, 
where she would succumb. 

She revived the same shrinking in him from a breath of 
their great word yet: not here ; somewhere in the shadow 
of the mountains. 

But he was sure of her. And their hands might join. 
The two hands thought so, or did not think, behaved like 
innocents. 

The spirit of Dr. Middleton, as Clara felt, had been blown 
into Vernon, rewarding him for forthright outspeaking. 
Over their books, Vernon had abruptly shut up a volume 
and related the tale of the house. “ Has this man a spice of 
religion in him ? ” the Bev. Doctor asked midway. Vernon 
made out a fair general case for his cousin in that respect. 
“ The complemental dot on his i of a commonly civilized 
human creature ! ” said Dr. Middleton, looking at his watch 
and finding it too late to leave the house before morning. 
The risky communication was to come. Vernon was pro¬ 
ceeding with the narrative of Willoughby’s generous plan 
when Dr. Middleton electrified him by calling out: “ He 
whom of all men living I should desire my daughter to 
espouse ! ” and Willoughby rose in the Bev. Doctor’s esteem : 
he praised that sensibly minded gentleman, who could 
acquiesce in the turn of mood of a little maid, albeit For¬ 
tune had withheld from him a taste of the switch at school. 
The father of the little maid’s appreciation of her volatility 
was exhibited in his exhortation to Vernon to be off to her 
at once with his authority to finish her moods and assure 
him of peace in the morning. Vernon hesitated. Dr. Mid¬ 
dleton remarked upon being not so sure that it was not he 
who had done the mischief. Thereupon Vernon, to prove 
his honesty, made his own story bare. “ Go to her,” said 


L^ETITIA ANT) SIR WILLOUGHBY 


511 


Dr. Middleton. Vernon proposed a meeting in Switzerland, 
to which Dr. Middleton assented, adding: “ Go to her : ” and 
as he appeared a total stranger to the decorum of the situa- 
tion, Vernon put his delicacy aside, and taking his heart up, 
obeyed. He too had pondered on Clara’s consent to meet 
him after she knew of Willoughby’s terms, and her grave 
sweet manner during the ramble over the park. Her 
father’s breath had been blown into him; so now, with 
nothing but the faith lying in sensation to convince him of 
his happy fortune (and how unconvincing that may be until 
the mind has grasped and stamped it, we experience even 
then when we acknowledge that we are most blest), he held 
her hand. And if it was hard for him, for both, but harder 
for the man, to restrain their particular word from a flight 
to heaven when the cage stood open and nature beckoned, 
he was practised in self-mastery, and she loved him the 
more. 

Laetitia was a witness of their union of hands on her 
coming back to the room. 

They promised to visit her very early in the morning, 
neither of them conceiving that they left her to a night of 
storm and tears. 

She sat meditating on Clara’s present appreciation of Sir 
Willoughby’s generosity. 


CHAPTER XLIX 

L.KTITIA AND SIR WILLOUGHBY 

We cannot be abettors of the tribes of imps whose revelry 
is in the frailties of our poor human constitution. They 
have their place and their service, and so long as we con¬ 
tinue to be what we are now, they will hang on to us, rest¬ 
lessly plucking at the garments which cover our nakedness, 
nor ever ceasing to twitch them and strain at them until 
they have fairly stripped us for one of their horrible Wal- 
purgis nights : when the laughter heard is of a character to 
render laughter frightful to the ears of men throughout the 



512 


THE EGOIST 


remainder of their days. But if in these festival hours 
under the beams of Hecate they are uncontrollable by the 
Comic Muse, she will not flatter them with her presence 
during the course of their insane and impious hilarities, 
whereof a description would out-Brocken Brockens and make 
Graymalkin and Paddock too intimately our familiars. 

It shall suffice to say that from hour to hour of the mid¬ 
night to the grey-eyed morn, assisted at intervals by the 
ladies Eleanor and Isabel, and by Mr. Dale awakened and 
reawakened — hearing the vehemence of his petitioning out¬ 
cry to soften her obduracy — Sir Willoughby pursued Laetitia 
with solicitations to espouse him, until the inveteracy of his 
wooing wore the aspect of the life-long love he raved of 
aroused to a state of mania. He appeared, he departed, he 
returned; and all the while his imps were about him and 
upon him, riding him, prompting, driving, inspiring him 
with outrageous pathos, an eloquence to move any one but 
the dead, which its object seemed to be in her torpid atten¬ 
tion. He heard them, he talked to them, caressed them; 
he flung them off and ran from them, and stood vanquished 
for them to mount him again and swarm on him. There 
are men thus imp-haunted. Men who, setting their minds 
upon an object, must have it, breed imps. They are noted 
for their singularities, as their converse with the invisible 
and amazing distractions are called. Willoughby became 
aware of them that night. He said to himself, upon one of 
his dashes into solitude : I believe I am possessed! And if 
he did not actually believe it, but only suspected it, or 
framed speech to account for the transformation he had 
undergone into a desperately beseeching creature, having 
lost acquaintance with his habitual personality, the opera¬ 
tions of an impish host had undoubtedly smitten his 
consciousness. 

He had them in his brain: for while burning with an 
ardour for Laetitia, that incited him to frantic excesses of 
language and comportment, he was aware of shouts of the 
names of Lady Busshe and Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, the 
which, freezing him as they did, were directly the cause of 
his hurrying to a wilder extravagance and more headlong 
determination to subdue before break of day the woman he 
almost dreaded to behold bv daylight, though he had now 


ILETITIA AND SIR WILLOUGHBY 


513 


passionately persuaded himself of his love of her. He could 
not, he felt, stand in the daylight without her. She was his 
morning. She was, he raved, his predestinated wife. He 
cried: “ Darling ! ” both to her and to solitude. Every 
prescription of his ideal of demeanour as an example to his 
class and country, was abandoned by the enamoured gentle¬ 
man. He had lost command of his countenance. He 
stooped so far as to kneel, and not gracefully. Nay, it is in 
the chronicles of the invisible host around him, that in a fit 
of supplication, upon a cry of “ Laetitia! ” twice repeated, 
he whimpered. 

Let so much suffice. And indeed not without reason do 
the multitudes of the servants of the Muse in this land of 
social policy avoid scenes of an inordinate wantonness, 
which detract from the dignity of our leaders and menace 
human nature with confusion. Sagacious are they who con¬ 
duct the individual on broad lines, over familiar tracks, 
under well-known characteristics. What men will do, and 
amorously minded men will do, is less the question than 
what it is politic that they should be shown to do. 

The night wore through. Laetitia was bent, but had not 
yielded. She had been obliged to say — and how many 
times, she could not bear to recollect: “ I do not love you ; 
I have no love to give; ” and issuing from such a night to 
look again upon the face of day, she scarcely felt that she 
was alive. 

The contest was renewed by her father with the singing 
of the birds. Mr. Dale then produced the first serious 
impression she had received. He spoke of their circum¬ 
stances, of his being taken from her and leaving her to 
poverty, in weak health ; of the injury done to her health 
by writing for bread ; and of the oppressive weight he 
would be relieved of by her consenting. He no longer 
implored her; he put the case on common ground. 

And he wound up: “ Pray do not be ruthless, my girl.” 

The practical statement, and this adjuration incongru¬ 
ously to conclude it, harmonized with her disordered under¬ 
standing, her loss of all sentiment and her desire to be 
kind. She sighed to herself: “ Happily, it is over! ” 

Her father was too weak to rise. He fell asleep. She 
was bound down to the house for hours; and she walked 


514 


THE EGOIST 


through her suite, here at the doors, there at the windows, 
thinking of Clara’s remark “ of a century passing.” She had 
not wished it, but a light had come on her to show her 
what she would have supposed a century could not have 
effected: she saw the impossible of overnight a possible 
thing : not desireable, yet possible, wearing the features of 
the possible. Happily, she had resisted too firmly to be 
again besought. 

Those features of the possible once beheld allured the 
mind to reconsider them. Wealth gives us the power to do 
good on earth. Wealth enables us to see the world, the 
beautiful scenes of the earth. Laetitia had long thirsted 
both for a dowering money-bag at her girdle, and the wings 
to fly abroad over lands which had begun to seem fabulous 
in her starved imagination. Then, moreover, if her senti¬ 
ment for this gentleman was gone, it was only a delusion 
gone; accurate sight and knowledge of him would not make 
a woman the less helpful mate. That was the mate he 
required: and he could be led. A sentimental attachment 
would have been serviceless to him. Not so the woman 
allied by a purely rational bond: and he wanted guiding. 
Happily, she had told him too much of her feeble health 
and her lovelessness to be reduced to submit to another 
attack. 

She busied herself in her room, arranging for her depar¬ 
ture, so that no minutes might be lost after her father had 
breakfasted and dressed. 

Clara was her earliest visitor, and each asked the other 
whether she had slept, and took the answer from the face 
presented to her. The rings of Laetitia’s eyes were very 
dark. Clara was her mirror, and she said: “ A singular 
object to be persecuted through a night for her hand ! I 
know these two damp dead leaves I wear on my cheeks to 
remind me of midnight vigils. But you have slept well, 
Clara.” 

“ I have slept well, and yet I could say I have not slept 
at all, Laetitia. I was with you, dear, part in dream and 
part in thought: hoping to find you sensible before I go.” 

“ Sensible. That is the word for me.” 

Laetitia briefly sketched the history of the night; and 
Clara said, with a manifest sincerity that testified of her 


LJETITIA AND SIR WILLOUGHBY 515 

gratitude to Sir Willoughby: u Could you resist him, so 
earnest as he is ? ” 

Laetitia saw the human nature without sourness: and 
replied: “1 hope, Clara, you will not begin with a large 
stock of sentiment, for there is nothing like it for making 
you hard, matter-of-fact, worldly, calculating.” 

The next visitor was Vernon, exceedingly anxious for 
news of Mr. Dale. Lsetitia went into her father’s room to 
obtain it for him. Returning she found them both with, 
sad visages, and she ventured, in alarm for them, to ask 
the cause. 

“It’s this,” Vernon said: “ Willoughby will everlast¬ 
ingly tease that boy to be loved by him. Perhaps, poor 
fellow, he had an excuse last night. Anyhow he went into 
Crossjay’s room this morning, woke him up and talked to 
him, and set the lad crying, and what with one thing and 
another Crossjay got a berry in his throat, as he calls it, 
and poured out everything he knew and all he had done. 
I need n’t tell you the consequence. He has ruined himself 
here for good, so I must take him.” 

Vernon glanced at Clara. “ You must indeed,” said she. 
“ He is my boy as well as yours. No chance of pardon ? ” 

“ It *s not likely.” 

“ Laetitia! ” 

“ What can I do ? ” 

“ Oh ! what can you not do ? ” 

“ I do not know.” 

“ Teach him to forgive ! ” 

Laetitia’s brows were heavy and Clara forebore to torment 
her. 

She would not descend to the family breakfast-table. 
Clara would fain have stayed to drink tea with her in her 
own room, but a last act of conformity was demanded of the 
liberated young lady. She promised to run up the moment 
breakfast was over. Not unnaturally, therefore, Laetitia 
supposed it to be she to whom she gave admission, half an 
hour later, with a glad cry of, “ Come in, dear.” 

The knock had sounded like Clara’s. 

Sir Willoughby entered. 

He stepped forward. He seized her hands. “Dear!” 
he said. “ You cannot withdraw that. You called me dear. 


516 


THE EGOIST 


I am, I must be dear to you. The word is out, by accident 
or not, but, by heaven, I have it and I give it up to no one. 
And love me or not — marry me, and my love will bring it 
back to you. You have taught me I am not so strong. I 
must have you by my side. You have powers I did not 
credit you with.” 

“ You are mistaken in me, Sir Willoughby,” Lsetitia said 
feebly, outworn as she was. 

“ A woman who can resist me by declining to be my wife, 
through a whole night of entreaty, has the quality I need 
for my house, and I batter at her ears for months, with as 
little rest as I had last night, before I surrender my chance 
of her. But I told you last night I want you within the 
twelve hours. I have staked my pride on it. By noon you 
are mine : you are introduced to Mrs. Mountstuart as mine, 
as the lady of my life and house. And to the world! I 
shall not let you go.” 

“ You will not detain me here, Sir Willoughby ? 99 

“ I will detain you. I will use force and guile. I will 
spare nothing.” 

He raved for a term, as he had done overnight. 

On his growing rather breathless, Lsetitia said: “You do 
not ask me for love ? ” 

“I do not. I pay you the higher compliment of asking 
for you, love or no love. My love shall be enough. Reward 
me or not. I am not used to be denied.” 

“ But do you know what you ask for ? Do you remember 
what I told you of myself ? I am hard, materialistic; I 
have lost faith in romance, the skeleton is present with me 
all over life. And my health is not good. I crave for money. 
I should marry to be rich. I should not worship you. I 
should be a burden, barely a living one, irresponsive and 
cold. Conceive such a wife, Sir Willoughby ! 99 

“ It will be you! ” 

She tried to recall how this would have sung in her ears 
long back. Her bosom rose and fell in absolute dejection. 
Her ammunition of arguments against him had been ex¬ 
pended overnight. 

“You are so unforgiving,” she said. 

“ Is it I who am ? ” 

“ You do not know me.” 


L-2ETITIA AND SIR WILLOUGHBY 517 

“But you are the woman of all the world who knows me, 
Lae titia.” 

“ Can you think it better for you to be known ? ” 

He was about to say other words: he checked them. “ I 
believe I do not know myself. Anything you will, only give 
me your hand; give it; trust to me; you shall direct me. 
If I have faults, help me to obliterate them.” 

“ Will you not expect me to regard them as the virtues of 
meaner men ? ” 

“ You will be my wife! ” 

Laetitia broke from him, crying: “ Your wife, your critic! 
Oh ! I cannot think it possible. Send for the ladies. Let 
them hear me.” 

“ They are at hand,” said Willoughby, opening the door. 

They were in one of the upper rooms anxiously on the 
watch. 

“ Dear ladies,” Laetitia said to them, as they entered. “ J 
am going to wound you, and I grieve to do it: but rather 
now than later, if I am to be your housemate. He asks me 
for a hand that cannot carry a heart, because mine is dead. 
I repeat it. I used to think the heart a woman’s marriage 
portion for her husband. I see now that she may consent, 
and he accept her, without one. But it is right that you 
should know what I am when I consent. I was once a 
foolish romantic girl; now I am a sickly woman, all illu¬ 
sions vanished. Privation has made me what an abounding 
fortune usually makes of others — lam an Egoist. I am not 
deceiving you. That is my real character. My girl’s view of 
him has entirely changed ; and I am almost indifferent to the 
change. I can endeavour to respect him, I cannot venerate.” 

“ Dear child ! ” the ladies gently remonstrated. 

Willoughby motioned to them. 

“ If we are to live together, and I could very happily live 
with you,” Laetitia continued to address them, “ you must 
not be ignorant of me. And if you, as I imagine, worship 
him blindly, I do not know how we are to live together. 
And never shall you quit this house to make way for me. I 
have a hard detective eye. I see many faults.” 

“ Have we not all of us faults, dear child ? ” 

“ Not such as he has; though the excuses of a gentleman 
nurtured in idolatry may be pleaded. But he should know 


518 


THE EGOIST 


that they are seen, and seen by her he asks to be his wife, 
that no misunderstanding may exist, and while it is yet 
time he may consult his feelings. He worships himself.” 

“ Willoughby ? ” 

“ He is vindictive.” 

“ Our Willoughby ? ” 

“That is not your opinion, ladies. It is firmly mine. 
Time has taught it me. So, if you and I are at such vari¬ 
ance, how can we live together ? It is an impossibility.” 

They looked at Willoughby. He nodded imperiously. 

“ We have never affirmed that our dear nephew is devoid 
of faults. If he is offended . . . And supposing he claims 
to be foremost, is it not his rightful claim, made good by 
much generosity ? Keflect, dear Lmtitia. We are your 
friends too.” 

She could not chastise the kind ladies any further. 

“You have always been my good friends.” 

“ And you have no other charge against him ? ” 

Lsetitia was milder in saying, “ He is unpardoning.” 

“ Name one instance, Lsetitia.” 

“ He has turned Cross jay out of his house, interdicting 
the poor boy ever to enter it again.” 

“ Cross jay,” said Willoughby, “ was guilty of a piece of 
infamous treachery.” 

“ Which is the cause of your persecuting me to become 
your wife ! ” 

There was a cry of “ Persecuting ! ” 

“ No young fellow behaving so basely can come to good,” 
said Willoughby, stained about the face with flecks of red¬ 
ness at the lashings he received. 

“ Honestly,” she retorted. “ He told of himself: and he 
must have anticipated the punishment he would meet. He 
should have been studying with a master for his profession. 
He has been kept here in comparative idleness to be alter¬ 
nately petted and discarded: no one but Vernon Whitford, 
a poor gentleman doomed to struggle for a livelihood by 
literature — I know something of that struggle — too much 
for me! — no one but Mr. Whitford for his friend.” 

“Crossjay is forgiven,” said Willoughby. 

“ You promise me that ? ” 

“ He shall be packed off to a crammer at once.” 


LiETITIA AND SIR WILLOUGHBY 


519 


“ But my home must be Crossjay's home.” 

“ You are mistress of my house, Laetitia.” 

She hesitated. Her eyelashes grew moist. “ You can be 
generous.” 

“ He is, dear child ! ” the ladies cried. “ He is. Forget 
his errors in his generosity, as we do.” 

“ There is that wretched man Flitch.” 

“ That sot has gone about the county for years to get me 
a bad character,” said Willoughby. 

“ It would have been generous in you to have offered him 
another chance. He has children.” 

“ Nine. And I am responsible for them ? ” 

“ I speak of being generous.” 

“ Dictate.” Willoughby spread out his arms. 

“ Surely now you should be satisfied, Laetitia,” said the 
ladies. 

“Is he?" 

Willoughby perceived Mrs. Mountstuart’s carriage coming 
down the avenue. 

“ To the full.” He presented his hand. 

She raised hers with the fingers catching back before she 
ceased to speak, and dropped it: — 

“Ladies, you are witnesses that there is no concealment, 
there has been no reserve, on my part. May heaven grant 
me kinder eyes than I have now. I would not have you 
change your opinion of him; only that you should see how 
I read him. For the rest, I vow to do my duty by him. 
Whatever is of worth in me is at his service. I am very 
tired. I feel I must yield or break. This is his wish, and 
I submit.” 

“And I salute my wife,” said Willoughby, making 
her hand his own, and warming to his possession as he 
performed the act. 

Mrs. Mountstuart’s indecent hurry to be at the Hall before 
the departure of Dr. Middleton and his daughter, afflicted 
him with visions of the physical contrast which would be 
sharply perceptible to her this morning of his Laetitia beside 
Clara. 

But he had the lady with brains ! He had: and he was 
to learn the nature of that possession in the woman who is 
our wife. 


520 


TELE EGOIST 


CHAPTER L 

UPON WHICH THE CURTAIN FALLS 

“ Plain sense upon the marriage question is my demand 
upon man and woman, for the stopping of many a tragedy.” 

These were Dr. Middleton’s words in reply to Willough¬ 
by’s brief explanation. 

He did not say that he had shown it parentally while 
the tragedy was threatening, or at least there was danger 
of a precipitate descent from the levels of comedy. The 
parents of hymenaeal men and women he was indisposed to 
consider as dramatis personae. Nor did he mention certain 
sympathetic regrets he entertained in contemplation of the 
health of Mr. Dale, for whom, poor gentleman, the proffer 
of a bottle of the Patterne Port would be an egregious 
mockery. He paced about, anxious for his departure, and 
seeming better pleased with the society of Colonel De Craye 
than with that of any of the others. Colonel de Craye 
assiduously courted him, was anecdotal, deferential, charm¬ 
ingly vivacious, the very man the Rev. Doctor liked for 
company when plunged in the bustle of the preliminaries 
to a journey. 

“ You would be a cheerful travelling comrade, sir,” he 
remarked, and spoke of his doom to lead his daughter over 
the Alps and Alpine lakes for the Summer months. 

Strange to tell, the Alps for the Summer months, was a 
settled project of the colonel’s. 

And thence Dr. Middleton was to be hauled along to the 
habitable quarters of North Italy in high Summer-tide. 

That also had been traced for a route on the map of 
Colonel De Craye. 

“We are started in June, I am informed,” said Dr. 
Middleton. 

June, by miracle, was the month the colonel had fixed 
upon. 

“ I trust we shall meet, sir,” said he. 

“ I would gladly reckon it in my catalogue of pleasures,” 
the Rev. Doctor responded: “ for in good sooth it is con- 
jectureable that I shall be left very much alone.” 


THE CURTAIN FALLS 


521 


u Paris, Strasburg, Basle ? " the colonel inquired. 

“The Lake of Constance, I am told,” said Dr. Middleton. 

Colonel De Craye spied eagerly for an opportunity of 
exchanging a pair of syllables with the third and fairest 
party of this glorious expedition to come. 

Willoughby met him, and rewarded the colonel's frank¬ 
ness in stating that he was on the look-out for Miss Middle- 
ton to take his leave of her, by furnishing him the occasion. 
He conducted his friend Horace to the Blue Boom, where 
Clara and Lsetitia were seated circling a half embrace with 
a brook of chatter, and contrived an excuse for leading 
Laetitia forth. Some minutes later Mrs. Mountstuart called 
aloud for the colonel, to drive him away. Willoughby, 
whose good offices were unabated by the services he per¬ 
formed to each in rotation, ushered her into the Blue Boom, 
hearing her say, as she stood at the entrance: “ Is the man 
coming to spend a day with me with a face like that ?" 

She was met and detained by Clara. 

De Craye came out. 

“ What are you thinking of ? " said Willoughby. 

“ I was thinking," said the colonel, “ of developing a heart, 
like you, and taking to think of others." 

“At last I" 

“Ah, you’re a true friend, Willoughby, a true friend. 
And a cousin to boot!" 

“ What! has Clara been communicative ? ” 

“ The itinerary of a voyage Miss Middleton is going to 
make." 

“ Do you join them ? ” 

“ Why, it would be delightful, Willoughby, but it happens 
I've got a lot of powder I want to let off, and so I’ve an idea 
of shouldering my gun along the sea-coast and shooting 
gulls : which ’ll be a harmless form of committing parricide 
and matricide and fratricide — for there 's my family, and I 
come of it! — the gull! And I’ve to talk lively to Mrs. 
Mountstuart for something like a matter of twelve hours, 
calculating that she goes to bed at midnight: and I would n't 
bet on it; such is the energy of ladies of that age ! " 

Willoughby scorned the man who could not conceal a blow, 
even though he joked over his discomfiture. 

“ Gull 1" he muttered. 


622 


THE EGOIST 


“ A bird that’s easy to be bad, and better for stuffing than 
for eating,” said De Craye. “ You 'll miss your cousin.” 

“ I have,” replied Willoughby, “ one fully equal to sup¬ 
plying his place.” 

There was confusion in the hall for a time, and an assembly 
of the household to witness the departure of Dr. Middleton 
and his daughter. Vernon had been driven off by Dr. Corney, 
who further recommended rest for Mr. Dale, and promised 
to keep an eye for Cross jay along the road. 

“ I think you will find him at the station, and if you do, 
command him to come straight back here,” Laetitia said to 
Clara. 

The answer was an affectionate squeeze, and Clara’s hand 
was extended to Willoughby, who bowed over it with perfect 
courtesy, bidding her adieu. 

So the knot was cut. And the next carriage to Dr. Mid¬ 
dleton’s was Mrs. Mountstuart’s, conveying the great lady 
and Colonel De Craye. 

“ I beg you not to wear that face with me,” she said to 
him. “ I have had to dissemble, which I hate, and I have 
quite enough to endure, and I must be amused, or I shall 
run away from you and enlist that little countryman of 
yours, and him I can count on to be professionally restorative. 
Who can fathom the heart of a girl ! Here is Lady Busshe 
right once more ! And I was wrong. She must be a gambler 
by nature. I never should have risked such a guess as that. 
Colonel De Craye, you lengthen your face preternaturally, 
you distort it purposely.” 

“Ma’am,” returned De Craye, “the boast of our army is 
never to know when we are beaten, and that tells of a great¬ 
hearted soldiery. But there’s a field where the Briton must 
own his defeat, w'hether smiling or crying, and I’m not so 
sure that a short howl does n’t do him honour.” 

“ She was, I am certain, in love with Vernon Whitford all 
along, Colonel De Craye ! ” 

“ Ah !” the colonel drank it in. “I have learnt that it 
was not the gentleman in whom I am chiefly interested. So 
it was not so hard for the lady to vow to friend Willoughby 
she would marry no one else! ” 

“ Girls are unfathomable! And Lady Busshe — I know 
she did not go by character — shot one of her random 


THE CURTAIN FALLS 


523 


guesses, and she triumphs. We shall never hear the last of 
it. And I had all the opportunities. I ’m bound to confess 
I had.” 

“Did you by chance, ma’am,” De Craye said with a 
twinkle, “ drop a hint to Willoughby of her turn for Vernon 
Whitford?” 

“ No,” said Mrs. Mountstuart, “ I ’in not a mischief-maker; 
and the policy of the county is to keep him in love with 
himself, or Patterne will be likely to be as dull as it was 
without a lady enthroned. When his pride is at ease he 
is a prince. I can read men. Now, Colonel De Craye, pray, 
be lively.” 

“ I should have been livelier, I’m afraid, if you had dropped 
a bit of a hint to Willoughby. But you ’re the magnanimous 
person, ma’am, and revenge for a stroke in the game of love 
shows us unworthy to win.” 

Mrs. Mountstuart menaced him with her parasol. “I 
forbid sentiments, Colonel De Craye. They are always 
followed by sighs.” 

‘ ‘ Grant me five minutes of inward retirement, and I ’ll 
come out formed for your commands, ma’am,” said he. 

Before the termination of that space De Craye was en¬ 
chanting Mrs. Mountstuart, and she in consequence was 
restored to her natural wit. 

So, and much so universally, the world of his dread and 
his unconscious worship wagged over Sir Willoughby Pat¬ 
terne and his change of brides, until the preparations for the 
festivities of the marriage flushed him in his county’s eyes 
to something of the splendid glow he had worn on the great 
day of his majority. That was upon the season when two 
lovers met between the Swiss and Tyrol Alps over the Lake 
of Constance. Sitting beside them the Comic Muse is grave 
and sisterly. But taking a glance at the others of her late 
company of actors, she compresses her lips. 


THE END. 












I 











































